[xenadu02]

Open sourcing the compiler, CoreCLR, and JIT made Xamarin's life easier, not harder.

Acquiring Xamarin is just acknowledging that Windows Phone is DOA and their best shot at monetizing the mobile world is providing backend hosting/services and developer tools. That's not a secret - that's their publicly announced strategy.

I'd expect all the Xamarin tools to be built-in to VS going forward. One VS/MSDN subscription gets you everything and the tools will make it trivially easy to host on Azure.

[carlospaulino]

Exactly what I was thinking. They are probably going to go with a business model similar to Amazon's Lumberyard