Microsoft's Windows Bridge for iOS goes open-source; now available as preview

Project Islandwood, now officially known as the Windows Bridge for iOS, was first revealed at BUILD 2015 in San Francisco earlier this year.

This bridge allows developers to bring their current iOS source code for apps and games to the Windows platform for both Windows 8.1 and the recently released Windows 10.

During the demo back in April, Microsoft revealed that Candy Crush Saga was ported by King to Windows Phone using this tool in the fall of 2014. While the game arrived on Windows Phone past its huge popularity on other platforms its arrival was better late than never.

For perspective on the port and how it has been received the Windows Phone version of the game has become very popular in the Windows Store with over 59,000 ratings at almost 5 Stars. More than 52,400 of those ratings are 4 and 5 Stars.

A Windows 10 version of the game was also released for desktop PC's running the new OS when it was released on 29/7 which was also ported using the same tools.

According to the briefing on this during the BUILD 2015 keynote the port took significantly less time thanks to these tools.

So if you are an iOS developer you may want to dig into this preview and join in on not only using it but helping to expand the tool because Microsoft has also released this bridge to GitHub as open-source.

"We’re releasing the iOS bridge as an open-source project under the MIT license. Given the ambition of the project, making it easy for iOS developers to build and run apps on Windows, it is important to note that today’s release is clearly a work-in-progress — some of the features demonstrated at Build are not yet ready or still in an early state. Regardless, we’d love for the interested and curious to look at the bridge, and compare what we’re building with your app’s requirements. And, for the really ambitious, we invite you to help us by contributing to the project, as community contributors — with source code, tests, bug reports, or comments. We welcome any and all participation in building this bridge."

To learn more about the release of these tools and how you can get started check out these two sources:

The final release of Windows Bridge for iOS is expected this fall.