What is TouchDevelop?
TouchDevelop is a free programming environment and language created by Microsoft Research. It enables anyone to develop mobile apps directly on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
Some key things to know about TouchDevelop:
- It uses a tile-based visual programming interface that lets you drag and connect blocks of code logic to build apps, making development simple and intuitive.
- Apps can access device capabilities like sensors, camera, GPS etc. It targets beginner developers and students.
- Apps run locally on the mobile device and can also connect to online data sources.
- It uses its own TouchDevelop scripting language based on JavaScript. The scripts get converted to native code.
- Apps can be published to the TouchDevelop cloud platform to share with others. The platform handles hosting and execution of the apps.
- TouchDevelop supports both creating new apps as well as editing and remixing existing shared apps to customize them.
In summary, TouchDevelop brings a unique mobile-first, touch-optimized app dev and coding experience to mobile devices for learning and creating simple apps.