News

Realm Mobile Platform Supports Xamarin, Microsoft Azure

• By David Ramel
• February 14, 2017

Realm today announced new support for Microsoft technologies in its Realm Mobile Platform, which, having hit version 1.0 just last month, facilitates the creation of real-time mobile apps.

The big news is that the company's mobile platform now fully supports Xamarin, Microsoft's tooling for creating cross-platform, native mobile apps with one code base written in C#. Xamarin was a prominent cross-platform solution that was acquired by Microsoft about a year ago.

"This support is a significant step forward for C# developers who can now build interactive and reactive experiences simply by connecting their app, powered by the Realm Mobile Database, to the Realm Object Server," Realm said in a news release today. "Without writing any serialization or networking code, the Realm Mobile Platform gives developers everything they need to build rich, realtime apps, by handling conflict resolution, user authentication and customizable permissions. With the Realm Mobile Database storing data on the client, users also get a first-class offline experience."

Realm also announced its mobile platform is now available as an Azure Virtual Hard Drive on Microsoft's cloud platform. Finally, the Microsoft integration news was filled out by the announcement that Realm's object database -- its original offering designed to replace SQLite that grew into the full-fledged mobile platform -- now supports Windows Desktop. That means developers can now use the object database on the vast base of computers that support the Win32 API.

"Developers can now use Realm as the database in their Windows desktop applications and create custom tooling to generate and view Realm data," the company said. "With this new release, developers receive the same benefits from using an object database and Realm's APIs as mobile developer communities."

To show off the functionality of the new Microsoft integration, Realm worked with the Redmond software giant to create a sample demo app -- called Realm-Draw, now on GitHub -- that leverages Xamarin and Azure.

"Realm's mission is to give mobile developers optimal database solutions to power their data-driven applications," said Realm CEO Alexander Stigsen. "Our comprehensive support for Microsoft technologies and platforms gives millions of Xamarin and C# developers a seamless, best-in-class solution for taking their brilliant ideas from initial code to high scale deployment. We can't wait to see what the community builds with Realm, Xamarin and Microsoft."