Xamarin Announces .NET Embedding

Nov 15, 2017. New York City. Yesterday, at the Microsoft Connect() event in New York City, Microsoft announced .NET Embedding feature added to Xamarin.

.NET Embedding allows your existing .NET Code (C#, F#, and others) to be consumed from other programming languages and in various different environments.

This means that if you have a .NET library that you want to use from your existing iOS app, you can do that. Or if you want to link it with a native C++ library, you can also do that. Or consume .NET code from Java.

Environments and Languages

The tool is both aware of the environment it will use, as well as the language that will consume it. For example, the iOS platform does not allow just-in-time (JIT) compilation, so the embeddinator will statically compile your .NET code into native code that can be used in iOS. Other environments do allow JIT compilation, and in those enviroments, we opt to JIT compile.

It supports various language consumers, so it surfaces .NET code as idiomatic code in the target language. This is the list of supported languages at present:

  • Objective-C – mapping .NET to idiomatic Objective-C APIs.
  • Java – mapping .NET to idiomatic Java APIs.
  • C: mapping .NET to an object-oriented like C APIs.

Get started with .NET Embedding here >>

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