Xamarin comes to the Microsoft HoloLens

Microsoft acquired Xamarin for a reported $400 million earlier this year. Xamarin allows developers to write cross-paltform apps, providing native experiences for Android, iOS and Windows. When developing apps using Xamarin, developers can use a good amount of their app’s codebase across Android, iOS and Windows but still provide a native experience easily. Following the acquisition of Xamarin, Microsoft opened up some important parts of Xamarin — for example, the company started offering Xamarin for free to Visual Studio users, and it also open-sourced the Xamarin runtime.

Today, Xamarin’s Miguel de Icaza announced that they are bringing Xamarin to Microsoft’s HoloLens. Developers can now use UrhoSharp (a Game Engine) to develop Holographic experiences for the HoloLens. Xamarin has released a sample game, providing a sneak peak at what you can do with UrhoSharp on the HoloLens. If you already own a HoloLens, you can give also give it a try by installing the NuGet package for UrhoSharp HoloLens from here.

Xamarin comes to HoloLens, get started today with our NuGet: https://t.co/Lcj8MadgmI samples: https://t.co/O6GGeqbbaY

— Miguel de Icaza ? (@migueldeicaza) September 12, 2016

It is worth mentioning that Microsoft already allows developers to release their apps and games for the HoloLens via the Windows Store. If you are a Windows Developer making apps and games for the Universal Windows Platform, you should be able to bring it to the HoloLens and Windows Holographic quite easily. And if you would like to get a HoloLens, you can get the HoloLens Development Edition from the Microsoft Store for $3000.