Mobile developers building apps for iOS and Android have some new tools from Microsoft designed to make their lives easier. On Thursday, the company unveiled a series of apps and services, including one that’s designed to let Windows-based developers test iOS apps from their PCs.

Called Xamarin Live Player, the app allows developers to link their iOS or Android phones with Visual Studio on Windows or Mac and then test the .Net mobile applications they’re building in a matter of seconds.

It’s designed to solve two key problems: developers needing to burn time setting up their development environments, and the time that it takes to compile applications, according to Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman.

After a developer starts work on an iOS or Android app, and “you’re past day one, so you’ve imported some frameworks and libraries, and your app has grown in complexity, your compile and deploy times actually grow pretty quickly,” he said. “It goes from being kind of a sixty-second thing to five minutes or seven minutes, and suddenly, it’s slowing you down.”