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Visual Studio Community: What is it?
Visual Studio Community is a free version of
Visual Studio IDE that lets individual users develop modern applications for Windows, Android and iOS. It also lets organizations do classroom training and academic research but nothing beyond that due to licensing restrictions.
What is Xamarin
Microsoft acquired Xamarin on February 26th 2016 . It implements a C#-shared codebase, using which developers can write native Android, iOS, and Windows apps with native user interfaces and share code across multiple platforms.
How can you get it
You can download the Visual Studio Community executable from
here.
How can you get VS community up and running in Azure
Let’s see how to install and spin up VS in our Azure environment. The executable file will be available at the downloaded location.
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- Run the executable file.
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- VS Community 2015 will start initializing the setup.
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- Choose the installation location and Select Custom. If default is selected Xamarin templates won’t be installed. Click on Install.
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- Select C#/.Net(Xamarin) and other templates that you need to have in the VS environment.
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- Installation requires downloading and installation of dependencies which will take some time.
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It took me nearly 1 hour to get the entire set up done.
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- Once completed restart the machine to update the registry entries and other installation dependencies.
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- You can either sign in with the Microsoft account or click on ‘Not now, maybe later ‘ which will straight away start VS for you.
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Thus the installation is complete and you can get started with any of the available VS project templates.
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If we go to the Cross-Platform tab we can find the Xamarin templates which can be used to get started with cross platform native apps.