Windows Platform Bridges: Bringing existing apps, games, or websites to Windows 10

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We are working on platform bridges that will make it very easy to bring code from other platforms to Windows 10. Currently, two bridges are ready for you to try: The Windows Bridge for iOS and for Hosted Web Apps. We are also working on future bridges: A Windows Bridge for Classic Windows Apps, the Mobilize.net Silverlight Bridge and a Windows Bridge for Android. For details, see our bridges developer page.

The Windows Bridge for iOS is a Microsoft open-source project that provides an Objective-C development environment for Visual Studio and support for iOS APIs. Getting started using the bridge is easy!

If you don’t already have Visual Studio, you can download Visual Studio Community 2015 for free from Microsoft’s Developer Center. Or, you can try the bridge using a downloadable evaluation virtual machine and your favorite virtualization environment – VMware (PC), Hyper-V, VirtualBox or Parallels.

Installing the bridge is easy. Download the binary from the GitHub repository and extract winobjc.zip to onto your PC.

Import your Xcode project into Visual Studio by using the vsimporter tool included with the SDK. Or start writing your next great Universal Windows Platform app in Visual Studio using Objective-C. For more information visit the Windows Bridge for iOS Wiki.

Want a quick overview about running your Objective-C code on Windows? Check out our Channel9 video.

The Windows Bridge for Web Apps – also called “Hosted Web Apps” makes it easy for you to create a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app that packages your website for publishing to the Store.

These apps look great across all Windows-based devices, including PCs, tablets, phones, Surface Hub, Xbox and in the future even HoloLens.

You can mix local HTML/JS content hosted as part of your app with your online content while calling native Windows APIs from JavaScript running on your website, creating a more engaging user experience and an app that is always as up-to-date as your website!

Visit our online documentation and see how to create your Hosted Web App, how to enable it to access native Windows features and for demo apps including source code to study the technology.

For a quick tour of Hosted Web Apps, see this Channel9 video.