Always one of our favorite HTML5 app development platform vendors, Telerik – which delivers on various solutions for building and analyzing cross-platform and mobile applications, announced yesterday a major update to its Icenium cloud-based mobile app development platform. Icenium’s early roots actually come from inside of Microsoft (News – Alert), and we’ve sometimes chided Telerik’s Icenium team about the fact that the platform did not support Visual Studio. We’re almost tempted to add an exclamation point at the end of that sentence, but we are no longer able to chide Telerik on this.

Telerik Icenium now offers direct Visual Studio integration, which effectively ends our chiding and adds over one million potential developers to Telerik’s already substantial user base. The new capability enables any .NET (News – Alert) developer to now fully leverage all of Icenium’s mobile development tools directly from Visual Studio. The new capability significantly expands the ability of .Net developers to build and debug hybrid mobile apps and to quickly develop cross-platform apps for iOS and Android (News – Alert).

The Icenium platform helps developers quickly tackle the cross-device development challenge of building Web mobile apps by enabling the use of existing HTML5, CSS (News – Alert) and JavaScript skills to develop, test, and publish hybrid applications. These apps run on the iOS and Android mobile platforms – which of course make up the vast majority of mobile devices. Icenium focuses on delivering the Windows and browser-based cross-platform mobile development tools, mobile device simulators, and cloud-based Apache Cordova build services that give developers powerful and literally one-click app debugging and publishing capabilities.


Image via Shutterstock

With the new Icenium Visual Studio extension release those long forgotten .NET developers (we kid, we kid – obviously Telerik has in fact been thinking about them for a long time) are now finally able to take advantage of all Icenium platform capabilities without leaving the comfort of the Visual Studio IDE. This huge collection of diehard VS enthusiasts will now be able to directly access Icenium’s mobile development tools, including iOS and Android device simulators and cloud-based Apache Cordova builds for iOS and Android. And of course they retain the intimately familiar and advanced coding environment, rich ecosystem of IDE plug-ins, and the configurable build system that makes up Visual Studio.

Additionally, developers using Visual Studio with the Icenium extension will, for the first time, be able to use Icenium with any source control provider. Meaning, Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Subversion (SVN), for example, can now be used in addition to Icenium’s default support for git, making it even easier to integrate Icenium into existing development workflows. Developers will also have the ability to:

• 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).

Todd Anglin, EVP of cross-platform tools & services for Telerik notes, “We’ve significantly enhanced Icenium to now truly support the needs of the million plus .NET developer community. The .NET community can now leverage Telerik Icenium to create versatile, engaging cross-platform apps without giving-up that IDE they know and are totally loyal to.”

Hmm. Now all that remains missing is support for that other IDE – Eclipse. And that other Microsoft thing…you know, Windows Phone (News – Alert) 8!

Todd has a response to this as well, and says, “The VS integration now also opens the door for Icenium to support other popular development environments and workflows in the future. We want to make it as easy as possible for developers to create cross-platform mobile apps using the Icenium services and tools with the coding environments they love. This is just the beginning.”

Damn it, Telerik is taking all the fun out of chiding them. But developers can look forward to building great Web mobile apps – we suppose that is a fair trade.