One from the “making it easier for people” pages. Telerik is an application development tool vendor that powers the development operations of around 100000 organizations globally. Their Icenium product is a mobile-specific set of development tools that allow developers to prudce cross-platform applications. But what happens if you’re a developer that is happy with your existing development tool? Adopting a new integrated development environment seems like an unnecessary burden to place on developers.
This is the thinking behind this latest upgrade of Icenium which integrates the product directly into Visual Studio – thus allowing .NET developers to code mobile-ready apps in their existing IDE of choice. Icenium delivers development tools, mobile device simulation and cloud-based Apache Cordove build services – all with one click application debugging and publishing. Icenium covers both iOS and Android, another example where Windows Mobile is a forgotten cousin. With Icenium, developers can:
- Create new cross-platform Icenium mobile projects with jQuery Mobile and Telerik Kendo UI
- Manage and configure mobile app settings and custom Cordova plug-ins
- Connect and manage local development devices (coming in November)
Alongside the integration, developers using Visual Studio with the Icenium extension will be able to use Icenium with any source control provider. SO developers can use a range of source code services including Team Foundation Server and Subversion in addition to Icenium’s default support for git.
MyPOV
There are almost as many mobile development tools as there are mobile applications (OK, that’s a massive exaggeration, but you get the idea. Vendors are in a race to build extra functionality that will give them an advantage over their competitors. Integrating mobile development into .NET developers existing IDE of choice makes sense and should be a compelling proposition for those developers who use Visual Studio but haven’t yet adopted an alternative IDE. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s a logical development and one which developers should be positive about.