Microsoft releases iOS App Analysis tool for Windows Bridge

Microsoft today announced the availability of the App Analysis tool for Windows Bridge for iOS. It’s a free web service that automatically analyzes source code to determine what will work with the Windows Bridge, an open source project for turning existing apps into Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps.

“We want to make it as easy as possible to get started with the bridge — but until now, even finding out if your app was a good match for the bridge was a multi-step process that included downloading the SDK from GitHub, setting up Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015, generating a Visual Studio project for your iOS app, and finally running your code,” Microsoft program manager Nick Gerard wrote in a blog post.

The tool will name the specific frameworks and classes that the Windows Bridge for iOS supports, and it will also name the third-party services and software development kits (SDKs) in iOS apps and provide information about whether they work on Windows 10, Gerard wrote.

If you’re working on a PC, then you can get the Windows Bridge for iOS off of GitHub. Of course, some iOS developers will be using Macs, and Microsoft has accounted for that. Virtual machines (VMs) pre-installed with Windows 10, Visual Studio 2015, and the Windows Bridge for iOS are available for Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels, VirtualBox, and VMware. You can start working with the new iOS App Analysis tool for Windows Bridge for iOS after using the Export function in Xcode.

The release comes a few months after Microsoft said it was ending development of the Windows Bridge for Android. In April Microsoft released a preview of the Desktop App Converter for bringing Win32 apps to the Windows Store.