I have recently been looking at VSNomad - a Visual Studio extension RedGate is working on to target IOS and Android development using Visual Studio as your IDE.
Fellow GeeksWithBlogs blogger Kyle Burns puts together a really nice article motivating the “Why” behind VSNomad – if you are interested I would suggest giving it a read. For those that don’t have time to read Kyle’s post… from what I can tell VSNomad main purpose seems to be to allow you to use Visual Studio as your integrated development environment to develop IOS and Android apps in a cross platform no lock-in model.
I saw a similar concept demonstrated at the JSinSA conference by Garren Smith where he spoke primarily about jQuery Mobile – what concerned me about Garren’s presentation was at the time he was demonstrating the concept on a Mac using some text editor I can’t remember the name of and toggling between various console commands to get things working. While I am making a concerted effort to expand my horizons and learn Mac development realistically most of my world is still in Visual Studio and if I am able stay in this world and get more done – then three cheers. This seems to be what VSNomad is promising.
So, to see exactly what this VSNomad stuff was I went to their website and signed up to their early access beta program. I was given a registration code and a download link and in just a few minutes I had VSNomad up and running in Visual Studio.
In about the same amount of time I had my first lightweight application working – it was really really easy.
So, in the next day or so I will be putting up a post on my first app in VSNomad, but in the meantime if you haven’t signed up for the early access program I would suggest you give it a try!
