Microsoft and Perfecto Mobile announced new features for mobile app testing in Visual Studio and Microsoft Azure.

After a public preview, Microsoft has renamed and officially launched its 'mission control' service for mobile apps, now called Visual Studio App Center.

Xamarin is furthering its mission to make C# the mobile-development language of choice by allowing iOS coders to use Microsoft's Visual Studio.

For example, Visual Studio 2017 now starts up three times faster, project load times are four times faster, and build speeds on C++ projects are also noticeably quicker, Montgomery wrote.

Developers using Microsoft's Visual Studio Mobile Center back-end service hub can now directly update JavaScript-based apps via the CodePush service.

eWeek Labs' first look at code reveals that the biggest feature change in Microsoft Corp.'s Visual Studio .Net Beta 2 release is its support for graphical mobile application development.

Other new features promise make it easier for Visual Studio developers to connect apps to cloud services including Azure Mobile Apps data storage and authentication.

Microsoft updated its lightweight, open source code editor with a new tooling extension that provides support for building hybrid cross-platform mobile apps with Apache Cordova.