Installation of all necessary SDKs for Windows Phone and Android on Windows.Here are some of the highlights of Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova: Additionally Cordova natively doesn’t allow for building iOS applications on Windows, but using the Visual Studio tools you can actually develop and debug iOS apps on Windows. The Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova provide a consolidated installation for all the necessary SDKs and emulators, as well as an integrated development experience from coding to running and debugging of a Cordova applications, all within the boundaries of Visual Studio. Cordova on its own also doesn’t do anything for debugging your applications – it lets you build and run them on a device but there’s no debugging support. On Windows you also can’t build an iOS app, which is supported only on Macs. However, it’s your responsibility to collect all the SDKs and tools you need for each platform and set them up. Why do you need Visual Studio Integration?Ĭordova on its own does a pretty good job of letting you create projects and build them using command line tools. There are over 600 plug-ins that interfaces that provide access to most mobile device features and you can build your own plug-ins against native APIs if necessary. Because HTML5 mobile APIs are severely lacking in consistency and browser support, Cordova also provides a JavaScript based plug-in API that allows it to interact with native hardware and device APIs so you get access to native features of most mobile devices using a common multi-platform compatible interface. Cordova – or in this case the Visual Studio Cordova Tools – then can build the application for you into a mobile device specific package that can be deployed to an app store and run on a mobile device. As a developer you implement the Web interface using the same Web technologies you use for Web development: HTML5, CSS and JavaScript as well as any support libraries and frameworks you might be using.
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Cordova works by providing a native device application that hosts a full screen Web browser control as well as tooling for building the app and getting it ready for deployment to a mobile device. Cordovaįor those of you that don’t know, Apache Cordova – also known as Adobe PhoneGap – provides hybrid mobile Web development technology that lets you use standard Web technologies to build mobile apps. The highlight of these tools is the ability to easily debug Cordova applications using Web developer tools that are integrated directly in Visual Studio, allowing you to debug either the provided emulators and simulators, or debug actual attached live devices including iOS devices. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I actually took this toolset for a spin – it solves a real problem by providing a unified installer for the necessary SDKs and tools to support Android, Windows Phone and iOS, and provides a very well thought out development platform that builds on top of the already awesome Web tooling that Visual Studio provides. To be honest I didn’t have high hopes, given some disastrous presentations I’d recently seen on this toolset. Last week I took a look at the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova, which is currently available as a CTP preview.
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