Going mobile with the new Visual Studio Mobile Center
A few months ago when the Visual Studio Mobile Center was released, I decided to configure it in parallel with the DevOps process I was already creating in Visual Studio Team Services. My goal was to try and evaluate this new platform. The minimalist design, simple configuration, and the fact that it has several tools in just one place made it seem like a terrific platform for our mobile projects at UruIT. In this post, I’ll share with you more information about Visual Studio Mobile Center and my take on its many advantages.
What is Visual Studio Mobile Center?
Visual Studio Mobile Center (MC) is the new Microsoft product that contains a set of cloud services for building and managing your application by combining everything in one place and adopting Mobile DevOps practices.
The Mobile Center is an end-to-end solution that provides the complete management of your app’s life cycle through continuous integration, testing, delivery and monitoring. The platform supports iOS and Android projects in languages such as: Swift, Objective-C, Java, React Native and Xamarin.
Visual Studio Mobile Center is the evolution of services such as HockeyApp, Xamarin Test Cloud and some VSTS. In fact, the platform brings all of those services together in one unified solution.
Combining all features into one platform
Visual Studio Mobile Center offers tools for all of the stages of Mobile DevOps.For each one there are very interesting advantages, which I’ll go into more detail below.
Lifecycle services
BUILD
If we use the Visual Studio Online it is necessary to configure a Build definition for a specific branch. Only this way can we generate the ability to compile the project in an automated manner in each push or according to the trigger we choose.
In the new platform, the Build is very easy to configure. You just need to go to the Build Section, connect to GitHub, and select the project and its branch. Soon enough the compilation will already be running inside the Mobile Center. Also, it’s possible to trigger manual Builds as well.