Visual Studio 2010 can make Mac and iPhone apps?
Trip Chowdhry > , an analyst with tiny> Global Equities Research > , contends that 7 minutes of the June 7 keynote by Apple CEO> Steve Jobs > has been blocked off for a presentation by> Microsoft > (MSFT) > to talk about> Visual Studio 2010 > , the company’s suite of development tools. Chowdhry says the new version of VS will allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS. And here’s the kicker: he thinks Microsoft’s presentation could be given by none other than> Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer > .
ORLY?
It’s an interesting idea, though. The new version of Mac Office is meant to be more “Mac like”, which I had assumed meant that the development team actually went and started to use XCode. However, there’s all this massive amount of legacy code involved in Office - they wouldn’t have re-written the entire thing, would they? My original idea there was that they did the interface in XCode, and shovelled in masses of back-end code directly from Windows, emulated in some kind of virtual environment - they do own VirtualPC code, which probably helps there. All they would have had to write was the interface and some kind of glue code to mush the interface together with this back-end code copied and pasted from Windows, wrapped in a virtual wrapper.
But what if they’d decided to make their own development tools cross-compile for Mac? It would be just a small extra step to compile to iPhone.
If this is true (and it’s still a waaaay out-there kind of prediction), it could be another tick in the “Apple’s moving away from the Mac” column. Which I think they are, slowly. But that’s a topic for another time.