Microsoft has decided to release an early version of its previously announced Windows Bridge for iOS tools to the open source community. The bridge, which was announced in April 2015 at Microsoft's BUILD conference under the code name "Project Islandwood", will allow iOS developers to quickly convert their apps to ones that can run natively on Windows 10.
In a blog post, Microsoft explains why they released this preview version of Windows Bridge for iOS as an open source project:
"We're releasing 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, it is important to note that today's release is clearly a work-in-progress — some of the features demonstrated at Build are not yet ready or still in an early state. Regardless, we'd love for the interested and curious to look at the bridge, and compare what we're building with your app's requirements. And, for the really ambitious, we invite you to help us by contributing to the project, as community contributors — with source code, tests, bug reports, or comments. We welcome any and all participation in building this bridge."
The code is now available to download on GitHub, and currently supports turning iOS apps into ones for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 that run on x86 and x64 processors. The code will be updated later to support Windows 10 apps that run on ARM-based processors. The final version of Windows Bridge for iOS will be released later this fall.
Source: Microsoft
