Miguel and I just had the honor of helping kick off day two of dotnetConf, along with our good friend Scott Hanselman. dotnetConf is a two-day virtual event, dedicated to all things .NET and to highlighting our vibrant developer community. We had a few exciting announcements to share with everyone, which you can watch for yourself in the recording below, or read about in the summary that follows.

Xamarin.Forms for Windows Preview

We launched Xamarin.Forms a year ago, enabling developers to rapidly create native applications for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone from a single shared C# code base. One of our most popular samples from that launch is an app dedicated to all things Scott Hanselman – aptly named Hanselman.Forms.

For today’s intro with Scott, I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to re-launch Hanselman.Forms with podcast streaming and a few new bells and whistles showing off the latest features available in Xamarin.Forms, such as pull-to-refresh. But the fun didn’t stop there, as we capped off the demo with the exciting announcement of our preview support for building for Windows Store and Phone RT when developing with Xamarin.Forms.

Xamarin.Forms for Windows Preview is available now on NuGet as a pre-release package. This is a very early preview that we’re making publicly available to get as much feedback as possible from the community as we stabilize our Windows support over the next few months. To get started, simply add a new Windows Store app to your existing solution and with a few lines of initialization code and you are on your way. We have full documentation for this preview available on our developer portal, and you can download and run the source for Hanselman.Forms straight from GitHub.

Xamarin Everywhere

The theme of today’s talk was “.NET deserves to be everywhere”, so in addition to extending the Hanselman app to Windows Store, I also took the opportunity to update it with support for wearable platforms, because I know that everyone wants mission-critical Hanselman updates on their wrist. Now, you will find a brand new Android Wear and Apple Watch app as part of the Hanselman.Forms project with plenty of awesome shared C# code, and you can start building your own wearable apps today with WatchKit in Xamarin.iOS, or by referencing the Android Wear Component or NuGet in your Xamarin.Android projects.

Xamarin Subscriptions for OSS Contributors

We love the .NET community and are dedicated to supporting the huge community of .NET developers working on powerful NuGets like PCLStorage, SQLiteNet and other plugins for Xamarin and Windows.

To ensure that all open source projects have everything they need to succeed, today we also announced the expansion of our our support for OSS developers to include free Xamarin subscriptions with support for Visual Studio. Any open source developers with app store compatible licenses receive non-commercial Xamarin subscriptions for the purpose of developing, testing and maintaining compatibility with the Xamarin platform. Active developers on established open source projects can apply now.