Windows Bridge for iOS Preview Is Open Sourced -- Visual Studio Magazine

Windows Bridge for iOS Preview Is Open Sourced

Project Islandwood is currently available in preview form to the open source development community under the MIT license.

By Michael Domingo
08/06/2015

Not much time has lapsed since Microsoft unveiled its developer-laden plans for Windows 10 ubuiqity at BUILD 2015 in San Francisco in May. And now that it has released Visual Studio 2015 and Windows 10 within the last few weeks, the work on some key bridge technologies looks to be coming along nicely.

Just this week, Microsoft made available a preview of the Windows Bridge for iOS, also known as "Project Islandwood," to the open source development community under the MIT license. Kevin Gallo with the Windows Developer Platform group blogged about the release, which is expected in full form after summer.

Windows Bridge for iOS is just one of several bridge technologies for porting apps developed for other app platform delivery systems without having to reengineer those apps. Microsoft also has previews of Windows Bridge for Web apps ("Westminster'") and Windows Bridge for Android ("Astoria"). And Microsoft is working on allowing developers to port legacy Windows apps for Windows Store delivery with another bridge, "Project Centennial," that's slated for delivery some time next year.

Windows Bridge for iOS supports porting apps to Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 apps for x86 and x64 processors, with ARM processor support in the works. Developers who want to work with the source can get it at GitHub.

Windows Bridge for iOS is comprised of an Objective-C compiler (which Salmaan Ahmed, Program Manager for Windows Bridge for iOS, notes is not being open sourced but still available on GitHub), Objective-C runtime, and iOS API headers and libraries. It also includes Visual Studio tooling for allowing Xcode projects to play nice with the rest of VS tools and Windows SDKs.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.
Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.
Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.
AdaBoost Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.
Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.