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The company also described some of the features of the next version of ASP.NET, its Web development framework. This time, it's Microsoft's tools that will be used to develop for iOS and Android. Previously, the company shipped a range of toolkits for Android and iOS developers to make it easier for them to use Azure to provide back-end cloud services, but development for those platforms would still take place using those platforms' own tooling. It fits with the company's newly promoted strategy of supporting its services on any platform, not just its own. The Cordova support is significant for a range of reasons. Projects can be built, deployed, and debugged all from within Visual Studio, and this includes debugging on the Apache Ripple simulator, real devices (whether running Windows, Windows Phone, Android, or iOS), and the Android emulator. The integration, now available as a preview release, includes templates both for regular JavaScript and Microsoft's JavaScript derivative TypeScript. This time, the support is coming from Microsoft itself.
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NET-based build environment for Android and iOS. Visual Studio has previously supported third-party platforms when used with third-party products, such as Xamarin, which provides a. With the Cordova integration, Visual Studio will directly support building apps for all of these platforms. Cordova is a toolkit for building apps for iOS, Android, and Windows using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. At its TechEd conference today, Microsoft announced the next step in its "mobile first, cloud first" strategy with a preview of Apache Cordova support in Visual Studio.
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