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Visual Studio Tools for Tizen on Preview 2
Tizen is an open source app platform targeting mainly Samsung devices, from televisions, to phones, to wearables. Yep, there's a Visual Studio Tool for that, and it's on its second preview.
- By Michael Domingo
- 02/03/2017
A second preview of a Visual Studio tool set for working with the Tizen platform has been released. It's the follow-up to a collaboration between Samsung and Microsoft's Visual Studio engineering team to use Visual Studio as the IDE for Tizen-based applications.
Tizen is an open sourced, Linux-based operating system that was developed through the collaboration of a number of companies that includes Samsung, Panasonic, Sprint, Orange, Intel, and Huawei, among others. Those companies are part of a core group who formed the Tizen Association, whose purpose is to standardize on a platform that provides a consistent UI on various device form factors, from televisions, to smart phones, to wearables. Samsung has been leading the effort (the project itself is managed through The Linux Foundation), and has deployed Tizen in several of its cameras and wearables, including the popular Samsung Gear smart watch line.
The first preview of Visual Studio Tools for Tizen, released at Microsoft's Connect(); event back in November, was focused on providing mobile phone capabilities using Visual C#. (You can view a YouTube video of the original announcement at the Connect(); event, where the teams provided the initial preview of VS Tools for Tizen, here.)
The second preview, which is also called Tizen .NET on Tizen's developer site, has expanded platform support that includes the ability to use .NET and Xamarin APIs for television applications. The support also extends to a project wizard for quickly building sample applications based on targeted devices.
Other features include Tizen-specific "certificate manager, emulator manager, emulator control panel, and manifest editor," as well as platform-specific API packages for features such as smart cards, speech-to-text capabilities, authentication, media recorders, and other packages (a full list is here).
About the Author
Michael Domingo is a long-time software publishing veteran, having started up and managed several developer publications for the Clipper compiler, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. He's also managed IT pubs for 1105 Media, including Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and Virtualization Review before landing his current gig as Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief. Besides his publishing life, he's a professional photographer, whose work can be found by Googling domingophoto.