The Visual Studio Emulator for Android is a tool within the full Visual Studio 2015 suite, which Microsoft brought to Mac users for the first time back in April.

He demonstrated how Xamarin enables Visual Studio developers to create cross-platform apps for iOS, Android and Windows, while sharing significant amounts of code.

Almost ironically, what Visual Studio 2015 doesn't support, at least for now, is the Windows 10 Universal App Platform (UAP). Of course, that's not exactly surprising.

Microsoft’s accommodations for iOS and Android in “15” are not its first, however. The company previously has offered capabilities for Android and iOS in Visual Studio.

Late last year, Microsoft launched Visual Studio App Center, its new unified mobile app development lifecycle solution for developers who want to write iOS, Android, Windows and macOS apps.

Xamarin, with an upgrade to its Mono for Android SDK on Monday, is adding a drag-and-drop, graphical designer for building Android application interfaces within either Microsoft’s Visual Studio ...