Item — HN Reader

Xamarin currently offers VS integration only for the Business or Enterprise editions, the Free tier has no support for VS. You can however use a trial version of Xamarin (Bussiness or Enterprise) for about 30 days that will let you build iOS and Android apps with some limitations (the built executable has a limited life time, one day I think). After 30 days you can buy a Xamarin license or the tool will revert to the Free Xamarin tier (this one is severely limited - application size, integration with external libraries and so on).

According to this video http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Visual-Studio/Connect-event-... Xamarin (Bussiness or Enterprise) should work just fine with VS Community.

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They plan to change it, from http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-expand-global-...

  Free Xamarin Starter Edition for Visual Studio Users – 
  Today, Microsoft announced a new, free edition to Visual   
  Studio—Visual Studio Community. Visual Studio Community 
  contains support for extensions, which means it will be 
  Xamarin compatible with from day one. We want to help make   
  Visual Studio Community a tool for anyone to create native
  apps for iOS and Android, so we are announcing our plans to
  enable our freely available Xamarin Starter Edition to work 
  with Visual Studio Community. We are also doubling the size 
  limit on apps that can be created with Xamarin Starter Edition, 
  so that you can build even more capable apps for free. 
  This will be available in the coming weeks.

Thanks, I've seen their blog on other HN thread a few minutes ago. The future looks good if you write pure C# code, but if you want to use something like MonoGame you will still need to buy a Xamarin license.

I suppose Xamarin will offer VS support for the Indie license too, doesn't make much sense to offer support only for the Starter license. The Indie license allows you to use libraries like MonoGame.

The logical next step!