If it works good, this might do wonders for Microsoft's Windows phone app store. They are surely hoping people will be willing to build and upload the apps on their platform as well once they're written in an almost platform independent manner.
As I already mentioned in Reddit, this is great for those of us that enjoy using Visual Studio.<p>If I would be part of the Android team I would feel bad to have Microsoft providing a better developer experience than the team is able (willing) to deliver to NDK users.
When comes to ease of debugging Visual Studio is outstanding. Not the most powerful debugger in the world (WinDBG is much more advanced), but it's my experience is that it's easy to work with even for new people.
I'm quite suspect on how is 'cross-platform' feat is achieved. Non-UI code shares well. As for the other: "Windows, iOS, and Android app development<i>" ... "</i>Free Microsoft extensions available for download for iOS and Android development" may not as positive as it's spun to be.
Does anyone else find the use of "acquisition" a little weird here? I don't think anyone ever talks how "easy this software is to acquire" when they talk about features.
So it looks like this targets Windows and Android only (maybe iOS via Xamarin...?)<p>For an alternative the Poco C++ libraries[1] work on Android, iOS and Windows out of the box. Probably not as full featured and you obviously can't use existing Visual C++ code..., but its Open Source and mostly just works.<p>[1] <a href="http://pocoproject.org/" rel="nofollow">http://pocoproject.org/</a>
Meh, you know what - this is a bold move of Microsoft, and its quite compelling to see how they have embraced the platform-ology that must be embraced in mobile, these days. I applaud the effort.<p>But the tricky part of all of this is that so much of the mobile space is more common than people think. Glomming one platform on the other is sort of de-rigeur, in mobile - as it has (and still is and always will be) been on desktop, in the server space, and so on. Tricky thing: you can Run X on A if you use Y and A to make/build/run X. Got Y?<p>Microsoft: please port Visual Studio to all platforms, including my iPad, kthxbai..