Xamarin free with Visual Studio

Xamarin for Everyone | Xamarin Blog
"Xamarin will be in every edition of Visual Studio, including the widely-available Visual Studio Community Edition, which is free for individual developers, open source projects, academic research, education, and small professional teams. Develop and publish native apps for iOS and Android with C# or F# from directly within Visual Studio with no limits on app size.

For developers on the Mac, Xamarin Studio is now available as a benefit of your Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscription. Developers can use the newly-created Xamarin Studio Community Edition for free.
To begin developing iOS and Android apps with the full power of Xamarin and C#, download Xamarin Studio or Xamarin for Visual Studio today."

Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman on getting acquired by Microsoft | TechCrunch

“I was really surprised, to be honest,” he said. “Even already having this optimistic viewpoint that lead me to doing the acquisition, I wasn’t expecting the level of talent, passion, optimism, cooperation, and enthusiasm that I saw among Satya’s and Scott’s top team.” He also noted that he doesn’t think “the public reputation of Microsoft, even though it has improved, has caught up to the reality of what’s going on inside Microsoft.”