Xamarin tools will be free for Visual Studio customers, runtime to be open sourced

Microsoft's recent acquisition of Xamarin and its cross-platform app development tools is already paying off for developers. During Microsoft's Day 2 Build 2016 keynote address, the company said that the Xamarin tools will be available for free for all of its Visual Studio customers.

Access to the Xamarin tools will not only be available with the paid tiers of Visual Studio but also with Xamarin Studio for OS X as a free Community Edition. This shows that Microsoft wants to jump start cross-platform app creation across Windows 10, iOS and Android and could lead to a lot more apps for the Windows platform.

In addition, Microsoft also announced that the Xamarin runtime, SDK libraries and command line tools. will be released as an open source project. Again, this move will likely encourage more developers to use those tools to make apps that will work across platforms.