Microsoft has created a tool called the iOS to Windows Phone 7 API Mapping Tool to make it easy for iOS developers to port their apps over to the Windows Phone 7 platform. This would allow developers the tools to make that happen, and help both the developer and Microsoft in the end. Microsoft adds more apps to it’s store, which is expected to pass up Blackberry’s App World within a year, and give developers more presence as well.
According to Microsoft, the tool does not have every API mapped out yet, but they are working on making it more complete. It allows the developer to map their API’s, classes, events, etc to Windows compatible API’s, classes or events. The software also allows the developer to look at code examples and tutorials of ways to do things in Windows Phone 7 that they had done in iOS. It takes the Objective C code and quickly tries to convert it to C# code for the new platform. Although this tool is handy, not all the code will line up apples for apples because of differences in the UI and user controls on the phone itself. So there will still need to be a bit of user interaction with the code itself. It was also mentioned that Microsoft is working on a similar service for Android as well, but no release date has been published for that.
I say kudos to Microsoft for making this available. It will help everyone in the long run, and will allow Microsoft to quickly build up their library of apps available for their new phones and OS.
[via CNET]
