Xamarin.Forms gives you the gift of XAML if you're looking to take the short route to building mobile interfaces.

Xamarin also supports development on OS X using Xamarin Studio. This too is now available for free as a community edition for small teams, and is included in MSDN Subscriptions.

Microsoft announced Xamarin.Forms 5.0, a major release chock full of new functionality and features, but no official support for Visual Studio 2017.

If you wanted to use Visual Studio—the premier C# and .NET development environment, the one that almost every C# developer calls home—you were out of luck. With Xamarin 2.0, that all changes.

With this announcement you can enjoy Xamarin for free as part of Visual studio, and not just any Visual studio but every single version of the development software.

Xamarin today unveiled version 4 of its cross-platform development suite, featuring a new Xamarin Mac Agent that lets developers build iOS apps completely from within the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE.

Xamarin Studio IDE 6 for Mac OS X, for mobile development, brings its user interface and functionality closer to those of Microsoft’s own Visual Studio platform.

Xamarin 3 has a number of cross-platform code sharing features, including Shared Projects, which lets developers use code across iOS, Android and Windows while using Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio.

Xamarin's ties to Microsoft are growing ever tighter, thanks to Xamarin's acquisition of the Visual Studio division of Clarius Consulting.