Open sourcing the compiler, CoreCLR, and JIT made Xamarin&#x27;s life easier, not harder.<p>Acquiring Xamarin is just acknowledging that Windows Phone is DOA and their best shot at monetizing the mobile world is providing backend hosting&#x2F;services and developer tools. That&#x27;s not a secret - that&#x27;s their publicly announced strategy.<p>I&#x27;d expect all the Xamarin tools to be built-in to VS going forward. One VS&#x2F;MSDN subscription gets you everything and the tools will make it trivially easy to host on Azure.