Microsoft provides update on what's next for Windows Bridge for iOS

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ios bridge

Last year, Microsoft released the Windows Bridge for iOS aka Project Islandwood to make it easy for iOS developers to make great Windows apps while reusing much of their existing Objective-C code and iOS development skills. Since then, Microsoft has made significant progress on this project, like an updated CoreFoundation implementation, improved Auto Layout engine, and support for new UIKit classes. They also added native visualization and object inspection for Objective-C to Visual Studio earlier this year.

Microsoft today provided an update on what’s next for this project. In order to help developers to port iOS user interfaces to Windows, Microsoft will be sharing a series of technical design documents on GitHub. As a result, the iOS bridge will be able to offer:

  • Faster bring up of iOS controls, so more of UIKit is available to you
  • An improved touch-input model for more performant event handling
  • Much improved support for accessibility and localization
  • Better test automation, resulting in more stable and high-quality controls
  • Much improved integration with and leveraging of Windows’ UI framework, XAML

Read about it in detail here.

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