Xamarin offers a series of plugins to develop iOS and Android applications from within Visual Studio. These plugins allow you to develop apps for iOS, Android, and Windows, all while taking advantage of the tools you're already familiar with. Moreover, you can run Visual Studio inside a Virtual Machine (VM) on your Mac, so you don't even need a second development machine.

In order to take advantage of the Visual Studio plugins, you first need a Business or Enterprise subscription to Xamarin as well as a copy of Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher. For Xamarin.iOS developers, you will also need a networked Mac to act as a build machine because Windows machines can't compile to native iOS code. Additionally, at the time of writing this, whenever you need to work with XIBs you will need to transfer your solution to the Mac and open it from Xamarin.

Since the Visual Studio plugin still requires a Mac for development, you might ask yourself whether there...