Microsoft Releases Multi-Device Hybrid Apps (Preview) For Visual Studio, With Apache Cordova Integration

Microsoft today released a preview of Visual Studio tooling support for Apache Cordova. This will help developers build multi-device hybrid mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, targeting a broad range of mobile devices. Apache Cordova is a popular open source platform for creating such platform. Microsoft Open Technologies has contributed in making Cordova tools for Visual Studio. The web developers can use their existing skills in HTML and JavaScript to create hybrid packaged apps for multiple devices while taking advantage of each device’s capabilities.

Project templates are available for both JavaScript and TypeScript, and provide a standard blank Cordova starter project.  Developers can pick their HTML/JavaScript framework of choice, whether Backbone and jQuery UI, or Angular.js and Bootstrap, or WinJS.

Projects can be built, deployed, and debugged against a variety of devices, device emulators and web-based mobile simulators.  By default, you can use the Apache Ripple simulator to test your application in the browser before deploying to a device.  This preview release also supports attaching the Visual Studio debugger to Ripple or a local emulator or a device.  You can stay in Visual Studio while debugging your JavaScript and DOM layout running on an Android 4.4 device

By installing and configuring the vs-mda-remote npm package on a Mac, you can even build for iOS, deploy to a device via iTunes, or start your app in the iOS Simulator on a Mac right from Visual Studio.

Apache Cordova is a popular choice today for applications that share a large amount of code across a wide variety of devices.  Combining Apache Cordova with Visual Studio provides a great end-to-end development experience for mobile-first development.  It’s great to be partnering with the Apache Cordova project on delivering these experiences.

Source: Microsoft