software industry fate acquired by microsoft february 24 2016 founded may 16 2011 ; 5 years ago 2011 05 16 1 headquarters san francisco california key people miguel de icaza nat friedman website www.xamarin.com footnotes references 2 3 xamarin is a microsoft owned san francisco california based software company founded in may 2011 3 by the engineers that created mono 4 mono for android and monotouch which are cross platform implementations of the common language infrastructure cli and common language specifications often called microsoft . net . with a c shared codebase developers can use xamarin tools to write native android ios and windows apps with native user interfaces and share code across multiple platforms . 5 over 1 million developers were using xamarin s products in more than 120 countries around the world as of may 2015 . 6 on february 24 2016 microsoft announced it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire xamarin . 7 contents 1 history 1.1 ximian founding and acquisition 1.2 founding of xamarin 1.3 product development 1.4 funding 1.5 acquisition 1.6 microsoft subsidiary 2016 present 2 products 2.1 xamarin platform 2.2 xamarin.forms 2.3 xamarin test cloud 2.4 xamarin for visual studio 2.5 xamarin studio 2.6 xamarin.mac 2.7 . net mobility scanner 2.8 robovm 3 awards 4 acquisitions 5 references 6 external links history edit ximian founding and acquisition edit in june 2000 microsoft first announced their . net framework . 8 miguel de icaza of ximian began investigating whether a linux version was feasible . 9 the mono open source project was launched on july 19 2001 . ximian was bought by novell on august 4 2003 which was then acquired by attachmate in april 2011 . 10 after the acquisition attachmate announced hundreds of layoffs for the novell workforce including mono developers 11 putting the future of mono in question . 12 13 founding of xamarin edit on may 16 2011 miguel de icaza announced on his blog that mono would be developed and supported by xamarin a newly formed company that planned to release a new suite of mobile products . according to de icaza at least part of the original mono team had moved to the new company . 14 after this announcement the future of the project was questioned since monotouch and mono for android would now be in direct competition with the existing commercial offerings owned by attachmate . it was not known at that time how xamarin would prove they had not illegally used technologies previously developed when they were employed by novell for the same work . 15 16 in july 2011 however novell now a subsidiary of attachmate and xamarin announced that novell had granted a perpetual license for mono monotouch and mono for android to xamarin which formally and legally took official stewardship of the project . 17 18 product development edit in december 2012 xamarin released xamarin.mac 19 a plugin for the existing monodevelop integrated development environment ide which allows developers to build c based applications for the apple os x operating system and package them for publishing via the apple app store . in february 2013 xamarin announced the release of xamarin 2.0 . 20 the release included two main components xamarin studio a re branding of its open source ide monodevelop ; 21 and integration with visual studio microsoft s ide for the . net framework allowing visual studio to be used for creating applications for android and ios as well as for windows . funding edit on july 17 2013 xamarin announced that they had closed 16 million in series b funding led by lead edge capital . 22 several investors from their series a funding also participated including charles river ventures floodgate and ignition partners . on august 21 2014 xamarin successfully closed an additional 54 million in series c funding which is one of the largest rounds of funding ever raised by a mobile app development platform . 23 total funding for the company to date is 82 million . 24 acquisition edit on february 24 2016 xamarin and microsoft announced that microsoft signed a definitive agreement to acquire xamarin . 7 25 26 terms of the deal weren t disclosed though the wall street journal reported the price at between 400 million and 500 million . microsoft subsidiary 2016 present edit at microsoft build 2016 microsoft announced that they will open source the xamarin sdk and that they will bundle it as a free tool within microsoft visual studio s integrated development environment 27 and visual studio enterprise users would also get xamarin s enterprise features free of charge . as a part of the acquisition they would also relicense mono completely under the mit license and would release all other xamarin sdk software through the . net foundation also under the mit license . 28 29 products edit xamarin platform edit xamarin 2.0 was released in february 2013 30 xamarin.android and xamarin.ios that make it possible to do native android ios and windows development in c with either visual studio or xamarin studio . developers re use their existing c code and share significant code across device platforms . the product was used to make apps for several well known companies including 3m at & t hp and target . 31 32 xamarin integrates with visual studio microsoft s ide for the . net framework extending visual studio for android and ios development . 21 xamarin also released a component store to integrate backend systems 3rd party libraries cloud services and ui controls directly into mobile apps . 33 34 xamarin.forms edit introduced in xamarin 3 on may 28 2014 and allows one to use portable controls subsets that are mapped to native controls of android ios and windows phone . xamarin test cloud edit xamarin test cloud makes it possible to test mobile apps written in any language on real non jailbroken devices in the cloud . xamarin test cloud uses object based ui testing to simulate real user interactions . 35 xamarin for visual studio edit xamarin claims to be the only ide that allows for native android ios and windows app development within microsoft visual studio . 36 xamarin supplies add ins to microsoft visual studio that allows developers to build android ios and windows apps within the ide using code completion and intellisense . xamarin for visual studio also has extensions within microsoft visual studio that provide support for the building deploying and debugging of apps on a simulator or a device . 37 in late 2013 xamarin and microsoft announced a partnership that included further technical integration and customer programs to make it possible for their joint developer bases to build for all mobile platforms . 38 in addition xamarin now includes support for microsoft portable class libraries 39 and most c 5.0 features such as async await . ceo and co founder of xamarin nat friedman announced the alliance at the launch of visual studio 2013 in new york . on march 31 2016 microsoft announced that they were merging all of xamarin s software with every version of microsoft visual studio including visual studio community which shall receive xamarin studio community and this added various xamarin features to come pre installed in visual studio such as an ios emulator . 40 xamarin studio edit xamarin studio is now deprecated and replaced with xamarin for visual studio . at the time of its release in february 2013 xamarin studio was a standalone ide for mobile app development 21 as part of xamarin 2.0 based on the open source project monodevelop . 41 in addition to a debugger xamarin studio includes code completion in c an android ui builder for creating user interfaces without xml and integration with xcode interface builder for ios app design . 41 42 it is available on windows and os x. xamarin.mac edit xamarin.mac was created as a tool for apple technology application development using the c programming language . xamarin.mac as with xamarin.ios and xamarin.android gives developers up to 90 % of code reuse across android ios and windows . 43 xamarin.mac gives c developers the ability to build fully native cocoa apps for mac os x and allows for native apps that can be put into the mac app store . 44 45 . net mobility scanner edit xamarin s . net mobility scanner lets developers see how much of their . net code can run on other operating systems specifically android ios windows phone and windows store . it is a free web based service that uses silverlight . 46 robovm edit in october 2015 xamarin announced that they had acquired the swedish robovm for java developer platform akin to its offerings the reason stated by xamarin for the acquisition was that if they would develop a java based platform from the ground up that their end product would be similar to robovm so they acquired the company instead as a result robovm operates independently of the xamarin team . robovm enables developers to build java apps for ios and android with fully native uis native performances and all java apps have the complete access to the apis of each developer platform . 47 48 in april 2016 microsoft announced that they would discontinue robovm and cease all subscriptions after april 30 2017 . 49 bugvm a fork of robovm was created to maintain the free open source status . 50 awards edit visionary in the gartner magic quadrant for mobile application development platforms 51 dr dobbs jolt award mobile development tools 52 acquisitions edit in 2013 xamarin acquired the mobile application testing platform lesspainful . 53 in 2015 xamarin acquired the java application development platform robovm . 54 references edit announcing xamarin . miguel de icaza . retrieved may 16 2011 . nat friedman may 25 2011 . xamarin . retrieved may 25 2011 . a b binstock andrew june 11 2011 . net alternative in transition . informationweek . retrieved march 18 2012 . miguel de icaza may 16 2011 . miguel de icaza . retrieved may 16 2011 . what is xamarin . retrieved april 1 2014 . about xamarin . retrieved may 21 2015 . a b microsoft to acquire xamarin and empower more developers to build apps on any device . official microsoft blog . retrieved 2016 02 24 . microsoft sees nothing but . net ahead steven bonisteel zdnet june 23 2000 mono early history . mono list . october 13 2003 . the attachmate group completes acquisition of novell . april 27 2011 . retrieved april 1 2014 . koep paul may 2 2011 . employees say hundreds laid off at novell s provo office . ksl tv . retrieved may 7 2011 . j. vaughan nichols steven may 4 2011 . is mono dead is novell dying . zdnet . retrieved may 7 2011 . clarke gavin may 3 2011 . . net android and ios clones stripped by attachmate . the register . retrieved may 7 2011 . de icaza miguel may 16 2011 . announcing xamarin . retrieved may 29 2011 . now two weeks later we have a plan in place which includes both angel funding for keeping the team together as well as a couple of engineering contracts that will help us stay together as a team while we ship our revenue generating products the death and rebirth of mono . infoq.com . may 17 2011 . retrieved may 29 2011 . even if they aren t supporting it they do own a product that is in direct competition with xamarin s future offerings . without some sort of legal arrangement between attachmate and xamarin the latter would face the daunting prospect of proving that their new development doesn t use any the technology that the old one did . considering that this is really just a wrapper around the native api it would be hard to prove you had a clean