Xamarin for Absolute Beginners || Installing Xamarin

See how to install Xamarin, and get started with app development.

just announced at //build - "Xamarin for Everyone"

As of today, Visual Studio now includes Xamarin.

Xamarin will be in every edition of Visual Studio, including the widely-available Visual Studio Community Edition, which is free for individual developers, open source projects, academic research, education, and small professional teams. Develop and publish native apps for iOS and Android with C# or F# from directly within Visual Studio with no limits on app size.

For developers on the Mac, Xamarin Studio is now available as a benefit of your Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscription. Developers can use the newly-created Xamarin Studio Community Edition for free.

To begin developing iOS and Android apps with the full power of Xamarin and C#, download Xamarin Studio or Xamarin for Visual Studio today.

~ announcement

Microsoft's standalone Android Emulator

Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 now has options for Android development: C++, Cordova, and C# with Xamarin. When choosing one of those Android development options, Visual Studio will also install the brand new Visual Studio Emulator for Android to use as a target for debugging your app. You can also download the emulator without needing to install Visual Studio.

Source: Introducing Visual Studio’s Emulator for Android

Visual Studio Emulator for Android:



see it in action:

Visual Studio 2015 Emulator for Android

Visual Studio 2015 Emulator for Android


When developing for any platform, every developer needs a fast and reliable edit-compile-debug cycle. With Visual Studio 2015 Preview you can target Android and edit-compile-debug regardless of your choice of programming models: HTML/JavaScript with Cordova; C++; or C# with Xamarin. With all three of those choices, when you start debugging, you must first choose a target: a device, or an emulator. This video will provide an overview of Microsoft's emulator for Android specifically.

Keynote of Connect event: Visual Studio in a world of multiple devices

Get a deeper look on the next version of Visual Studio, and the innovation delivered to help you modernize existing applications faster and create new ones targeting multiple devices.

Multi-Device Hybrid Apps (Preview) for Visual Studio released

Multi-Device Hybrid Apps giving you the ability to build hybrid apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that work beautifully on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and Windows Store. All of this is done inside Visual Studio itself.

read more: Multi-Device Hybrid Apps (Preview)