Xamarin hops in with .NET Foundation

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Xamarin announced that the company is joining forces with Microsoft to support the newly established, independent .NET Foundation.

The .NET Foundation will foster development and collaboration efforts for the growing collection of open source .NET technologies, as the announcement revealed.

Over six million C# developers, including Xamarin's growing community of over 570,000 mobile developers, are said to benefit from the increased visibility, community participation and rapid innovation that the Foundation will foster.

"Xamarin's participation in the formation of an independent .NET Foundation will help us collectively support the collaborative and inventive spirit we see from developers," said S. Somasegar, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Corp. Developer Division. "Working together to support open source technologies will help our joint .NET developer communities innovate faster."

As of its founding the .NET Foundation will have 25 .NET open source projects under its stewardship, including Microsoft's newly announced .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") and the ASP.NET family of open source projects. Xamarin is contributing six projects to the foundation, including MimeKit and MailKit - robust cross-platform email libraries optimized for mobile. Additionally, Xamarin announced that Roslyn functionality will be incorporated into their mobile developer platform, enabling Xamarin developers to leverage Roslyn APIs to programmatically access C#.

"In Xamarin's work to help .NET developers go mobile, we've experienced first hand the .NET developer community's passion for open source, through their contributions, as well as the significant number of open source libraries available in the Xamarin Component Store," said Nat Friedman, co-founder and CEO, Xamarin. "Working with Microsoft as part of the .NET Foundation will help foster innovation faster for our joint developer communities."

With the rise of enterprise mobility, BYOD and the consumerization of IT, enterprises are focused on building apps for connected devices and services, and a primary goal of the Foundation is to support developers in this new world.

"The .NET Foundation will help accelerate the adoption of .NET across every platform and computing form factor-servers, mobile devices and desktops," said Miguel de Icaza, co-founder and CTO of Xamarin, and founding member of the .NET Foundation board. "We look forward to working with Microsoft and the entire .NET developer community to increase the rate of innovation."