Mono Developers Renew Their Love For Microsoft

Xamarin, the company driving the development of the Mono open-source .NET framework that is generally loved or hated by Phoronix readers, has announced a new partnership with Microsoft.

The latest direction of the Microsoft-Xamarin love-boat is for mobile developers using Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE to then rely on Xamarin's Mono-based technologies for unifying iOS and Android app development alongside Windows Phone. The partnership that was announced this morning at the Visual Studio Live 2013 event for better integrating Xamarin with Microsoft developer tools and services, Xamarin University is now free to MSDN subscribers, and MSDN subscribers will have exclusive trial and pricing options to Xamarin subscriptions.

Xamarin's press representative had wrote the fluffy benefits in an email, "This morning, during the keynote at the Visual Studio Live 2013 launch event, Xamarin and Microsoft announced a global partnership that enables Microsoft developers to create native mobile Windows, iOS and Android apps with the language they know, C#, and the tools they love, Visual Studio. This groundbreaking partnership empowers one of the world’s largest developer communities to become the most productive and innovative mobile developers – almost overnight. It includes not only technical integration, but also special pricing for MSDN subscribers and free access to Xamarin University, which will teach Microsoft developers to be cross platform mobile development rock stars in 30 days."

Should you be interested in learning more, there's a Xamarin blog post. As there's many Phoronix readers who are opposed to Mono and having this .NET run-time on Linux, the good news at least is that Xamarin is still devoted to the iOS/Android landscape and haven't done many activities on the Linux desktop recently and they don't seem to have a play at the moment for the rush of new Windows desktop games and software coming to Linux.