Microsoft is buying mobile tool vendor Xamarin

In a move that was expected and rumored for a long time, Microsoft is buying tool maker Xamarin.

Scott Guthrie, head of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise business, announced the intent to buy Xamarin on February 24, via a blog post.

The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed by either company.

From Guthrie's public note about the deal:

"We have had a longstanding partnership with Xamarin, and have jointly built Xamarin integration into Visual Studio, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and the Enterprise Mobility Suite to provide developers with an end-to-end workflow for native, secure apps across platforms. We have also worked closely together to offer the training, tools, services and workflows developers need to succeed.

"With today's acquisition announcement we will be taking this work much further to make our world class developer tools and services even better with deeper integration and seamless mobile app dev experiences. The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure provides a complete mobile app dev solution that provides everything you need to develop, test, deliver and instrument mobile apps for every device. We are really excited to see what developers build with it."

Microsoft officials plan to provide more details about its Xamarin integration plans in the future starting at Build at the end of March.

Microsoft was rumored to be on the cusp of buying Xamarin in 2014. The appeal was in Xamarin's technology, which allows developers using Microsoft's C# to write native apps for not just Windows, but also iOS, Android and the Mac.

Today's announcement has many of us wondering whether Microsoft is planning to use Xamarin's technology to create truly universal apps, not just Universal Windows Platform apps. Xamarin might provide Microsoft with a way to enable its developers to target non-Microsoft mobile platforms.