Dive Brief:

• Microsoft has released Windows Bridge for iOS — software designed to help programmers close the gap between apps for Windows and apps for Apple's iOS mobile platform.

• The company is releasing Windows Bridge for iOS as an open source project.

• The project is part of a broader company effort to move away from solely desktop-centric models that rely on Windows.

Dive Insight:

Windows Bridge for iOS provides an Objective-C development environment for Visual Studio and Windows. It is currently available as a preview on GitHub. The iOS bridge supports both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 apps built for x86 and x64 processor architectures.

"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," said Kevin Gallo, partner director of software engineering at Microsoft. "Between now and the fall, we'd love more eyes, feedback, and participation on the code, so we're doing our development in the open."

The final release is expected this fall. A Windows Bridge for Android is also in the works.