One might say that a developer is only as good as her tools–but that story has always gone deeper than that, a tale of skill and romance, a love-hate relationship with the most popular tools and the configurations that make a dev feel at home. Recently mobile developers received a huge treat from Telerik’s Icenium division with the integration of the development, testing, and publishing platform with Microsoft Visual Studio.

Telerik has heard the developer community loud-and-clear when it comes to what the most popular IDEs happen to be and VIsual Studio is amid them. In fact, the Icenium community has placed integrating Icenium with Visual Studio as the second-most request feature on the public feedback portal. Another request will need to fill in that niche now.

“There are very few ‘mobile developers’ today. That may sound counter-intuitive, but the reality is that most people developing for mobile today are coming from other kinds of software development,” said Todd Anglin, EVP of Cross-Platform Tools & Services at Telerik. “Mobile is still very new. Some developers are ready adopt completely new mobile workflows to address the change; others are looking to minimize the mobile disruption by adapting their existing workflows to work with mobile.”

Workflow and mobile development a redux

Mobile development has always produced a strange problem for developers and even operations. Instead of writing code that would run as applications on the same device as they’re written, apps are designed to go onto a myriad of other devices that run a plethora of different hardware, OSes, and even different screen factors. At the same time, those apps rely on servers floating somewhere in the cloud to provide data.

Before this extension to Icenium, developers had to manually copy/paste between installations and use git-based collaboration in a somewhat cumbersome. Code would be written in Visual Studio and then copied over into the git repository for use with Icenium’s packaging, testing, and deployment. This approach still works extremely well for git-based collaboration; but it doesn’t work as well for devs who use SVN or TFS.

Due to the newness and plastic nature of mobile development, older app development tools still must be integrated into workflow in interesting ways: either cobbled together into a pace-by-pace workflow or, in the case of Icenium’s new IDE enhancements, plugged directly into the tool.

“With the latest Icenium release,” Anglin adds. ”Telerik is ready to cater to either approach. We can provide and end-to-end mobile workflow that helps developers build, debug, test, and publish their apps. Or, thanks to Visual Studio integration, we can plug-in to familiar workflows and help ‘upgrade’ them for a mobile world.”

A before and after story

Before this release of the extension to Icenium developers would start their workflow by coding in an IDE as described above. After that, they would need to take their code out of the IDE environment and into the Icenium platform to make use of its source control, packaging, debugging, testing, and deployment capability. All of this shows the power and capability of the Icenium platform, but it would most certainly disrupt any workflow for a dev who is used to living within the Microsoft Visual Studio environment.

“With this release, Icenium becomes modular!” says Anglin, displaying excitement about exactly what makes this Icenium release so interesting. “It can fully integrate into Visual Studio for developers that love to use Microsoft’s tool for writing code. It delivers the best of both worlds: a first class cross-platform mobile development solution with a familiar coding environment. In addition, developers can now use any source control provider (like TFS) and work with Icenium completely offline.”

As a tool, Icenium already provides a huge suite of very important components to the toolbox of any mobile developer. By integrating with Microsoft Visual Studio, Telerik is showing an interest in how developers use the tool and is working towards making dev’s lives easier in an ever-evolving field.

Mobile development is difficult enough trying to stay ahead of every new form factor, OS, and hardware change as smartphones change shape and size, tablets change capabilities–all this together means that tools and suites such as Icenium need to keep up with the needs and desires of developers and that’s what we’re seeing in the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE integration.