What is Visual Studio App Center?

- [Narrator] Mobile application development requires an ecosystem of services to be successful. It is more than just opening up Xcode or Android Studio and coding away, any substantial app eventually has to be deployed to the users devices which brings up a variety of questions including how is the application going to be built, how will it be tested, and when this released how will we know our application is meeting our goals. Visual Studio App Center or VSAC, provides solutions to many of these problems.

They may be used together or a la carte. The first of these services is for building a mobile application. Automated builds can be important not only to save time, but to create consistent results. App Center also comes with automated test services with thousands of mobile devices in the cloud. This is the product formally know as Xamarin Test Cloud. These test service give us the ability to test our app on a wide variety devices that we may not actually own.

We also want to be able to distribute our app to quality assurance and UAT teams. This capability is also built into Visual Studio app center and is the evolution of Microsoft's hockey app. It can be important to collect crash reporting information in your application. That capability is also available to us through VSAC as well as the ability to monitor and report key application events to see if our application is meeting our goals. Finally, VSAC provides a consistent mechanism to implement push notifications for IOS, android, and UWP under one umbrella.

Consistent with the new Microsoft philosophy, VSAC supports more than just Microsoft technologies. In fact, it supports a wide range of app development technologies including Java Android applications created using Android Studio, Objective C and Swift using Xcode, React Native applications in JavaScript, UWP applications for Windows 10, Xamarin applications, and Visual Studio both for the PC and the Macintosh. It also includes some capabilities with Cordova and even macOS applications.