Xamarin Launches .NET Mobility Scanner to Help Enterprises Accelerate Mobile Projects

SAN FRANCISCO, June 25, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Xamarin, the company that empowers over 340,000 developers to build fully native mobile apps for iOS, Android and Mac, today announced a new online service designed to help developers more easily take their apps mobile. Available to all developers worldwide, the new service operates in a browser and scans existing .NET libraries to determine by device platform the percentage of code that can immediately be incorporated into mobile apps using Xamarin. The service also provides a roadmap of the additional work required to migrate the remaining code to create fully native iOS, Android, Mac, Windows Phone and Windows Store apps.  

According to Gartner, by 2016, 70 percent of the mobile workforce will have a smartphone, half of which will be purchased by the employee, and 90 percent of enterprises will have two or more platforms to support.  In addition, U.S. mobile commerce is now growing nearly three times faster than transactions from desktop PCs according to comScore.  With enterprise mobility, BYOD and the explosion of iOS, Android and Windows device usage for work and play, there is enormous pressure for businesses to migrate customer engagement and internal business processes to mobile devices on all major platforms.

Xamarin solves this challenge by unifying native iOS, Android and Mac development in C#, the language used by an estimated 8 million developers worldwide. With Xamarin, businesses leverage existing in-house developer skills, code and tools to build apps that share on average 75 percent of their source code across device platforms, essentially transforming existing teams into mobile developers virtually overnight. Unlike traditional approaches to cross-platform development that deliver lowest common denominator user experiences, Xamarin provides developers complete access to 100 percent of the device platform APIs, making it possible to build fully native apps for multiple platforms in a fraction of the time.

Enterprises typically have thousands of man years and millions of lines of C# and .NET code invested in desktop apps used for customer interactions and employee processes today. Migrating those apps to mobile using the platform-specific programming languages means rewriting that .NET code multiple times. With Xamarin, businesses can reuse significant amounts of existing .NET in their mobile apps and share that code across device platforms.  

With Xamarin's new .NET mobility scanner service, developers gain insight into how much of their existing .NET libraries can be reused in apps for each mobile platform using Xamarin and are able to create a detailed roadmap of the remaining code to mobilize.  Xamarin's deep analyses in its easy to use browser interface assist developers not only in planning for mobility, but also to see how easily they can reuse and share existing code in mobile apps, making the transition to multi-platform mobility more seamless.

"With the recent iPad and Android tablet explosion, we knew we had to provide an amazing experience on those devices," comments Nick Sykes, director of mobile projects, Xactware.  "With Xamarin, we were able to mobilize existing .NET code, greatly accelerating our timeline. We were glad that we were able to take the code we've built over the years and move it to a mobile environment in such a short amount of time."

"Our customers tell us that Xamarin has surprised them in many ways—they are thrilled to discover a C#-based platform for mobile development and are often amazed at how much of their existing code can be migrated to mobile immediately," says Nat Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Xamarin.  "This gives businesses the freedom and capacity to spend more time on important app features and to accelerate their timeline for supporting additional device platforms.  The .NET mobility scanner quantifies exactly how fast businesses can go mobile across multiple platforms."  

Availability
Xamarin's tool for .NET code scanning is immediately available here: scan.xamarin.com.

About Xamarin
Xamarin is the new standard for enterprise mobile development. No other platform enables businesses to reach all major devices—iOS, Android, Mac and Windows—with 100% fully native apps from a single code base.  With Xamarin, businesses standardize mobile app development in C#, share on average 75% source code across platforms, and leverage their existing skills, teams, tools and code to rapidly deliver great apps with broad reach.  Xamarin is used by over 340,000 developers from more than 100 Fortune 500 companies and over 17,000 paying customers including Microsoft, Kimberly-Clark, Clear Channel, Schindler, McKesson, Halliburton, Cognizant, GitHub, Rdio and WebMD, to accelerate the creation of mission-critical consumer and enterprise apps.  For more information, please visit: www.xamarin.com, read our blog, and follow us on Twitter @xamarin.

SOURCE Xamarin