Earlier today Microsoft released an early look at the Windows Bridge for iOS (previously known as 'Project Islandwood'). While the final release will happen later this fall (allowing the bridge to take advantage of new tooling capabilities that will ship with the upcoming Visual Studio 2015 Update), Microsoft is making the bridge available to the open-source community now in its current state. Between now and the fall, Microsoft is hoping to get more eyes, feedback, and participation on the code, so they're doing their development "in the open." Microsoft's Bridge for iOS enables developers to code Windows apps using Objective-C.

Microsoft is releasing the iOS bridge as an open-source project under the MIT license. Given the ambition of the project, making it easy for iOS developers to build and run apps on Windows, it is important to note that today's release is clearly a work-in-progress — some of the features demonstrated at Build are not yet ready or still in an early state.

Salmaan Ahmed has an in-depth post on the Windows Bridge for iOS discussing the compiler, runtime, IDE integration, and what the bridge is and isn't. Best of all, the source code for the iOS bridge is live on GitHub right now.

The iOS bridge supports both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 apps built for x86 and x64 processor architectures, and soon Microsoft plans to add compiler optimizations and support for ARM, which adds mobile support. For more on this, see Microsoft's Windows blog entry here.

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