Here’s the information
Xamarin announced on 31st March 2016 that it is available for free for everyone using Visual Studio which includes the free versions.
https://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-for-all/
What it means
This is huge news for the Xamarin community as well as the wider mobile app developer community who have made decisions about which platform to develop cross platform apps with. There are many people who have chosed other cross platform solutions because of the cost that comes with adding more developers to a Xamarin licence. As of last Thursday, this problem has been completely eradicated. The strategy for Microsoft is clear; establish a community of cross platform developers that rely on their backend services to build reliance on their Azure platform. It’s similar to what is happening with Amazon Webservices in the way that they own gaming plaforms Twitch and Lumberyard
Get involved
Why not join the Brighton Xamarinoes group run by AgileAppCo. and be part of an exciting community that has a very interesting future in the cross platform app development space!
http://www.meetup.com/Xamarin-Developers-Brighton/
Getting Started with Visual Studio
The first thing is to download all the updates that are available to ensure everything works with Visual Studio. We’d recommend starting a new test project in VS to ensure yuour mac and android settings are all working. Initially we tried using an Indie license with Visual Studio but there was an error saying we needed Starter or Business. So they’ve obviously just added Starter to the list of subscriptions that cover all features, but what we didn’t realise was that we needed to update all the latest patches first to ensure that the VS plugins handled the subsciption differently, once this happened the Xamarin login box showed “VISUAL STUDIO COMMUNITY” in place of where the Indie subscription for Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS were before.
For more trouble shooting on getting started check this link out which shows the common problems people are facing with the latest update.
http://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/comment/188164/
