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Deploy from Visual Studio 2012 to iOS, Windows Phone, Android and Windows

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Today I saw a demonstration by ITR Mobility  of their line of business application support for having one code base, written in C# that can be deployed to practically any platform you like. Does that should like it would be of use to you? Coz it sure as hell sounds like I could use it. I want to build an app… but I want to build in Visual Studio and that would limit me to Windows Phone and I really don’t want to lead Objective C!

Deploy from Visual Studio 2012 to iOS, Windows Phone, Android and Windows  

This solves that problem and although their marketing concentrates on mobile devices, the demo I saw showed c# running on Android, iOS, Windows and Windows CE and even on a terminal.

There seams to be two main ways they allow you to implement :

So if you have an application with only a few pages and lots of logic you can have full control, however if you have thousands of views to write across tens of application than you should probably think of using the more generic, but less sexy, approch to ge the job done.

The demo that I saw showed the same application and codebase compiled and running on:

That in its self knocked my socks off and allows for a standardisation on a single technology platform for all of your engineers for all of your applications. They also announced that they would support Windows 8 RT and Windows Phone 8 and Visual Studio 2012 within a short time of the release and they have been working with the Product Teams for a while to get that right.

You can code everything using the features provided in Visual Studio, arguably the most powerful and easiest to use IDE; store your source in Team Foundation Server; have your application automatically built using Team Foundation Build; and then have it automatically deployed to the app store of your choice.

Deploy from Visual Studio 2012 to iOS, Windows Phone, Android and Windows  

Figure: Building on Mac and deploy to App Store

From an ALM perspective this gives you a number of capabilities that you did not have before:

http://youtu.be/lbH9rIHyCp4?hd=1 

Figure: Video Overview and Demonstration

They have added a bunch of nifty framework logic to allow you to have your application running locally on a device, maybe offline, and another user working in a version deployed to Azure with full data synchronisation accross the platfomrs… amasing…

Deploy from Visual Studio 2012 to iOS, Windows Phone, Android and Windows  

Figure: Building code for iOS right in Visual Studio

If you are a user wanting to build line of business application for your organisation and you cant get agreement on a platform then this is for you. I will be recommending this to any and all of my customers that are building in the mobile space.

This is a demonstration of what can be done in the ALM space to solve a real need for customer and allow them to deliver more value more quickly to their customers.

Do you build mobile applications? Would this help you?

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