Welcome to the Windows Bridge for iOS project preview
Last week, Microsoft released Windows 10 as a free upgrade in over 190 markets, within 24 hours over 14 million installations of Windows 10 had been completed.
Along side the release the Windows team introduced a series of “bridging” technologies to enable developers to bring their existing iOS, Android, Web and desktop code and skillsets to the Windows Store.
What is WinObjC? Windows Bridge for iOS (previously known as ‘Project Islandwood’).
Windows Bridge for iOS (also referred to as WinObjC) is a Microsoft open source project that provides an Objective-C development environment for Visual Studio/Windows. In addition, WinObjC provides support for iOS API compatibility. While the final release will happen later this fall (allowing the bridge to take advantage of new tooling capabilities that will ship with the upcoming Visual Studio 2015 Update),
The bridge is available to the open-source community now in its current state. Between now and the fall. The iOS bridge as an open-source project under the MIT license. Given the ambition of the project, making it easy for iOS developers to build and run apps on Windows.
Salmaan Ahmed has an in-depth post on the Windows Bridge for iOS discussing the compiler, runtime, IDE integration, and what the bridge is and isn’t. Best of all, the source code for the iOS bridge is live on GitHub right now.
The iOS bridge supports both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 apps built for x86 and x64 processor architectures, and soon we will add compiler optimizations and support for ARM, which adds mobile support.
Windows Bridge for web apps
‘Project Westminster,’ is live and available with the release of Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015. Kiril Seksenov recently wrote a blog post on the web apps bridge detailing what happens at the Windows level, how the bridge functions, how you can use it to build ‘Hosted Web Apps’ and addressing common questions.
The Windows Bridge for Android,
‘Project Astoria’, is currently available as a technical preview by invitation only. To get on the waitlist for early access, please use the sign up form.As we make progress on the Android bridge, we are also contributing to open-source projects used by its community.
Angle OpenGL to DirectX
As part of this work Microsoft has submitted changes to help improve ANGLE. For those who haven’t hear of ANGLE, ANGLE provides translation of OpenGL to DirectX. These changes have been accepted by Google and improved ANGLE’s performance and compatibility with DX feature level 9.3.
The Windows Bridge for Classic Windows apps
‘Project Centennial,’ that will make it possible to package and publish your current .NET and Win32-based Windows applications to the Windows Store, will be ready for public testing next year.
I encourage everyone to check out the Windows Bridge for iOS and install Windows 10 and developer tools. If you feel that we are missing any feature or functionality, my team would love to know at User Voice.
Where to get it
Download the Windows Bridge for iOS SDK here - https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/