Microsoft has it’s launching its primary coding interface, Visual Studio, on Mac computers. The news may sound uninteresting, but it’s been a long time coming, and is a big shakeup for the company, which has previously preferred to lock developers into its platform by keeping coding tools Windows-only. The change comes as Microsoft shifts its focus to its money-making cloud operation. While programming tasks in the past might have been carried out on local servers, they’re now increasingly using platform-agnostic cloud services like (from Microsoft) and (from Amazon). By making Visual Studio cross-platform, Microsoft will be hoping to retain professional users that want to work on their projects from any operating system they like. The software is based on app development platform Xamarin Studio, and the change could encourage Mac and iOS developers to make more apps for Windows, as these users will no longer have to buy a Windows computer or set up a virtual machine to access Visual Studio. The news follows a similar announcement from earlier this year, when the company announced it would be adding to Windows for the first time ever.
As Microsoft's Scott Hanselman, adding Bash support was 'brilliant for developers that use a diverse set of tools' — launching Visual Studio for Mac is a similar move. A preview of the software will be unveiled at Microsoft’s Connect developer event later this week. For more information including technical details, head over to Microsoft’s announcing the news. Update November 14th, 8:54AM ET: Seems like Microsoft hit publish on this one a little early and has taken down the original blog post. You can find the cached version. How Visual Studio looks on a Mac.
Using Unity and Visual Studio for Mac, you can create awesome games that run on any platform. Use the powerful coding, refactoring, and debugging features in Visual Studio for Mac to enhance your productivity. Hello, I'm new to VS/Mac & specifically was expecting Visual Studio for Mac to be feature compatible, but I not seeing A LOT of missing menu items.
(Image credit: Microsoft).
Visual Studio 2017 launches today, and I’m in Redmond for both the launch event and a Q&A afterwards. Along with the launch, we have many fresh and exciting features for Visual Studio developers, as well as a new preview release of Visual Studio for Mac! Whether you are developing apps on Windows or macOS (or both!), today’s release will help you to build better mobile apps, faster.
Visual Studio for Mac Preview 4 Visual Studio for Mac is an with support for building iOS, Android, and Mac apps in C# and F# with Xamarin, as well as web and server apps with.NET Core and ASP.NET Core. You’ll find the same Roslyn-powered compiler, IntelliSense code completion, and refactoring experience you would expect from a Visual Studio IDE. And, since Visual Studio for Mac uses the same MSBuild solution and project format as Visual Studio, developers working on Mac and Windows can share projects across Mac and Windows transparently. Visual Studio for Mac Preview 4 brings lots of new features, including updates to the Xamarin and.NET Core workloads. Preview 4 brings expanded project templates for.NET Core, as well as support for the beautiful new MSBuild.NET Core project format.
The Xamarin workload has been updated to include a new iOS Audio Unit wizard, Android binding project operations, and other mobile tooling improvements. This preview also includes NuGet 4.0 support and tons of other bug fixes and performance improvements. Xamarin.Forms Previewer With our latest release for Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac, we have made many enhancements to the to increase the range of supported controls and XAML constructs. Additionally, with your feedback, we have been able to make the previewer much more reliable, including the initialization process. Be sure that you have the latest installed, as it is required for Android previewing. Improved Xamarin.Forms XAML IntelliSense Opening any Xamarin.Forms XAML document now provides a significantly improved IntelliSense experience in Visual Studio 2017. The new code completion engine supports bindings, custom properties, custom controls, converters, and much more.
We know you are going to love it! New & Updated Templates Many mobile apps are list views with data pulled down from the web, possibly with some form of social or enterprise authentication. In this release, we created new templates for Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac to reflect this reality. By just clicking a few buttons, you can bootstrap your next mobile project with a mobile app for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 that includes tabbed navigation, MVVM, settings, and more.
By clicking “Host in the cloud,” you can take your mobile project to the next level by provisioning a backend for your mobile app, complete with client-side code for online/offline synchronization and automatic conflict resolution. We have also overhauled all of our iOS, watchOS, and tvOS templates with a flurry of new extensions to make development a breeze. Connected Services Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac’s new Connected Services feature brings cloud capabilities, such as data storage and authentication with Azure Mobile Apps, to your mobile app with the click of a button. Adding a service to your project will add all required dependencies and any required initialization code to your mobile targets. Latest and Greatest SDKs This update includes the most up-to-date SDK support for all platforms, including Android 7.1, iOS 10.2, and watchOS 3. Be sure to update to the latest versions of the Xcode and Android SDKs to fully take advantage of the new features. So Much More To catch a glimpse of some of the awesome features in Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac Preview 4, head over to to catch the event live or watch a recording.
These are just some of the features you will find in this release, but there are a plethora of other enhancements, performance improvements, and bug fixes included. Visit our full for all of the goodies included or check out the release notes for all that’s new in Preview 4. Don’t forget to download the latest-and-greatest to make you a more productive developer: We need your feedback!
Use Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac’s “” or “Provide a Suggestion” dialog (within the Help menu) to provide feedback. Also, don’t forget about our and community forums, which provide a great place to leave feedback and learn from other developers.