Visual Studio 2015 Can Target Linux; Android Apps Anywhere Chrome Can Run
jones_supa writes Phoronix has noticed that the Visual Studio 2015 product page mentions that the new IDE can target Linux out of the box. Specifically the page says "Build for iOS, Android, Windows devices, Windows Server or Linux". What this actually means is not completely certain at this point, but it certainly laces nicely with the company opening up the .NET Framework. And speaking of cross-platform software: new submitter mccrew writes Google has released a tool that lets Android apps run on any machine that can run its Chrome browser. Called Arc Welder, the tool acts as a wrapper around Android apps so they can run on Windows, OS X and Linux machines. The software expands the places that Android apps can run and might make it easier for developers to get code working on different machines.
All of the CTP and preview releases have been shipping with Apache Cordova and an Android build target using mono for the underlying .Net implementation. Been like this for the past several months, targetting Android has been well known amongst .Net developers following VS2015.
The word "target" in this context refers to the runtime operating environment for which the executable is being built. This is common usage for compilers, which may be able to "target" multiple processors, or variants on architecture.