For decades, integrated development environments such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Eclipse or NetBeans served as the cornerstone for the development of applications. Typically these media are closely linked with a particular programming language. However, so far the operation of building and deploying applications on mobile platform are very time consuming.

Telerik, known for its supporting tools for developers, has the Icenium service designed to automate tasks that require significant effort using conventional integrated development environments for creating mobile apps. Icenium service implements all development operations in the cloud, making cloud services to all components and tools–SDK, compilers, tools for testing, debugging, and signing digital certificates.

Extending the cloud mobile app development, Telerik announces a major update to Icenium and now offers direct Visual Studio integration. As a result, developers can now take full advantage of .NET capabilities to compile applications in any development environment without being tied to a specific location or platform.

“Once again, we’ve significantly enhanced Telerik Icenium to further support the emerging needs of our 1M-strong .NET developer community,” said Todd Anglin, EVP of Cross-Platform Tools & Services, Telerik. “With the release of the Visual Studio Extension for Telerik Icenium, the .NET community can leverage Telerik Icenium to create versatile, engaging cross-platform apps without giving-up the IDE they know and love. This integration also opens the door for Icenium to support other popular development environments and workflows in the future. We want to make it as easy as possible for developers to create cross-platform mobile apps using the Icenium services and tools with the coding environments they love. This is just the beginning.”

With the addition of the Visual Studio extension, Icenium provides a mobile app development platform that enables the creation, building and publishing of iOS and Android applications using core Visual Studio benefits including a rich ecosystem of IDE plug-ins, and a configurable build system.

The new Icenium product aims to solve the problem of building software for mobile devices in a multi-platform world with jQuery Mobile and Telerik Kendo UI, manage and configure mobile app settings and custom Cordova plug-ins and connect and manage local development devices. In addition, Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Subversion (SVN) can be used to Icenium’s default support for git, making is easier to integrate Icenium into existing development workflows.

The last update of Icenium came in July this year that included Apache Cordova plugin support for developers who use HTML5 and JavaScript for hybrid mobile app development. Last week, the company extended the latest Apple iOS 7 capabilities support for Kendo UI, Icenium, Icenium Everlive, and Test Studio for iOS.