Today at the Microsoft Build conference, we announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2017 for Mac.
Visual Studio for Mac is a full-featured IDE built natively for the Mac, to help you develop, debug, and test anything from mobile and web apps to games. Teams across PC and Mac can share code seamlessly by relying on the same solutions and projects. This is all offered in an IDE that is natively designed for the Mac and feels right at home for any Mac user.
(If you want an editor that does run natively, Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio Code might fit the bill). There are multiple options for running Windows on a Mac. Every Mac comes with Apple’s Boot Camp software, which helps you install Windows into a separate partition.
Microsoft recently introduced Visual Studio for Mac.Many developers were impressed by the decision to release a flagship product on a competing platform after it had been Windows-exclusive for so. I have a Mac, but I can't get Visual Studio for Mac to install. I did some googling and the TLDR seems to be that it's incompatible with my OS.
Workloads for mobile, web, cloud and gaming
Mobile Development with C# and .NET
Visual Studio for Mac provides an amazing experience for creating mobile apps using Xamarin, from integrated designers to the code editing experience to the packaging and publishing tools. It is complemented by:
- The full power of the beloved-by-millions C# 7 programming language
- Complete .NET APIs covering 100% of the APIs for Android, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and macOS development
- The Xamarin.Forms API abstraction to maximize code sharing
- Access to thousands of .NET libraries on NuGet.org to accelerate your mobile development
- Highly optimized native code backed by the LLVM optimizing compiler
Web development with ASP.NET Core and Azure
Since we released the first Visual Studio for Mac preview last November, we’ve been working hard on porting over the web editor tools from Visual Studio on Windows. Now with this release, you have full support to build out rich web-based applications using ASP.NET Core and front-end languages like HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.
And when your web app is perfectly polished and ready for release, you can directly publish to Azure using the new Publish to Azure wizard, without having to leave the IDE.
Building Games using Unity
Newly announced at Build, Visual Studio for Mac now helps you create games using C#, .NET, and Unity.
When paired with Unity 5.6.1 you have full support to build and debug games from within the IDE, including support for:
- Project support, to easily browse and find your scripts
- Code completion for methods invoked from the game engine
- One click debugging support to attach to the Unity editor
Work seamlessly between the Mac and PC
Visual Studio for Mac helps you collaborate with others in your team, regardless of if they’re using a Mac or PC. Solutions and projects work in both Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio, making it easy for heterogenous development teams to collaborate on the same projects, across operating systems. This also means that you can easily “round-trip” between machines, without losing any efficiency.
Built for the Mac
Visual Studio for Mac is a new IDE experience built specifically for the Mac, not a direct port of Visual Studio on Windows. This means that the UI is built to feel like you would expect working with a macOS targeted application, from primitive elements like buttons and text to the layout of the application and icons. We’ve also optimized the developer workflow to what developers on a Mac expect, making it feel right at home, without a steep learning curve to adopt.
A preview of what’s coming up next
With this release, we’re just getting started, so today we also talked about some great new preview features, which we’ll make available in our alpha channel really soon. These are preview features that are not present on the stable release, but ready for you to try once released and give us feedback:
- Docker support: supporting deploying and debugging of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core in Docker containers.
- Azure Functions support: use this preview to develop, debug and deploy Azure Functions from your Mac.
- Target IoT devices: target IoT devices like Android Things with your C# code and Xamarin.
To try out these preview features, you can subscribe to the Alpha channel in Visual Studio for Mac.
Enjoy! And let us know what you think
If you already have Visual Studio for Mac Preview installed, make sure you update to the latest version from within the app. Fl studio for mac computers. If you haven’t tried out a preview yet, head on over to VisualStudio.com to download the latest release. To learn more about what’s in this release, check out the release notes.
Note: For everyone who downloads Visual Studio for Mac before May 17th, we’re offering an extended 60-day trial of Xamarin University, free of charge. This includes live instructor-led classes and great content to get you started using Visual Studio for Mac.
We’re very proud of this release and we want to hear what you think – please, send us your feedback! You can use Visual Studio for Mac’s “Report a Problem” or “Provide a Suggestion” dialog (within the Help menu) to provide feedback. Or join the conversation in the Visual Studio for Mac community forums.
Enjoy!
Miguel.
| Miguel de Icaza, Distinguished Engineer, Mobile Developer Tools @migueldeicaza Miguel is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, focused on the mobile platform and creating delightful developer tools. With Nat Friedman, he co-founded both Xamarin in 2011 and Ximian in 1999. Before that, Miguel co-founded the GNOME project in 1997 and has directed the Mono project since its creation in 2001, including multiple Mono releases at Novell. Miguel has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 Free Software Award, the MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year Award in 1999, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 innovators for the new century in September 2000. |
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This document provides a peek into what's next for Visual Studio for Mac. It captures some of the significant features we are currently committed to, and a rough timeframe for when you can expect to see them. It is not a comprehensive list of all new features in Visual Studio for Mac, but is intended to provide some visibility into our key investments. These feature sets and delivery timeframes are current, and are subject to change.
We welcome your suggestions! You can log your suggestions in the Developer Community. You can also report bugs with Report a Problem.
2019 Q3 (July-September)
| Feature | Visual Studio for Mac Version | Availability | Workloads or Standalone Installer |
|---|---|---|---|
| C# editor: Automatic namespace importing. | 8.2 | Released | All Workloads |
| C# editor: IntelliSense type/member filtering. | 8.2 | Released | All Workloads |
| .NET Core 3.0 Preview SDK support. | 8.2 | Released | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core |
| Improved XAML editor support for matching, binding context, and resource IntelliSense, now powered by the same service from Windows. | 8.2 | Released | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
| Be more productive by using Go-To-Definition and get better XML IntelliSense within Android layouts, resources, and manifest files. | 8.2 | Released | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
| Migration tooling to take your applications from Android Support Libraries to AndroidX. | 8.2 | Released | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
| Startup performance improvements up to 50% faster with profiled AOT support (“ahead of time” compilation). | 8.2 | Released | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
| .NET Core 3.0 SDK support. | 8.3 | In Preview | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core |
| C# 8 language support. | 8.3 | In Preview | All Workloads |
| C# editor: Preview window for Quick Fixes and Refactorings. | 8.3 | All Workloads | |
| Support for running on macOS Catalina. | 8.3 | In Preview | All Workloads |
| Improved interoperability with Git and the Git command line tools. | 8.3 | All Workloads | |
| Debugger reliability and performance improvements. | 8.3 | All Workloads | |
| Prompt to select keyboard bindings on startup. | 8.3 | All Workloads | |
| File tab pinning. | 8.3 | All Workloads | |
| NuGet solution-level package management. | 8.3 | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core, .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development | |
| Editing and building multi-targeted projects. | 8.3 | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core, .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development | |
| Debugging: Launch in target browser. | 8.3 | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core | |
| launchSettings.json support. | 8.3 | In Preview | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core |
| File nesting for ASP.NET Core projects. | 8.3 | In Preview | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core |
| Port of the web editors from Visual Studio on Windows: Razor Pages, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON. | 8.3 | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core | |
| Server-side Blazor support. | 8.3 | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core | |
| Reduced app size and improved packaging with Android App Bundle support. | 8.3 | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development | |
| Stronger protections for user privacy, new ways to engage users, and extended support for foldables using Android Q Preview Support. | 8.3 | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
2019 Q2 (April-June)
| Feature | Visual Studio for Mac Version | Availability | Workloads or Standalone Installer |
|---|---|---|---|
| New macOS native code editor with coding experiences that are shared with Visual Studio on Windows. | 8.1 | Released | All Workloads |
| Improved performance and reliability of the code editor. | 8.1 | Released | All Workloads |
| Edit code containing Right-To-Left content. | 8.1 | Released | All Workloads |
| Word wrap support in the code editor. | 8.1 | Released | All Workloads |
| Multiple-selection and multi-caret support in the code editor. | 8.1 | Released | All Workloads |
| C# Editor: Go to Implementation. | 8.1 | Released | All Workloads |
| ASP.NET Core client-side JavaScript templates for Angular and React.js. | 8.1 | Released | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core |
2019 Q1 (January-March)
| Feature | Visual Studio for Mac Version | Availability | Workloads or Standalone Installer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quickly open code you recently worked on or start from one of the most commonly used flows like clone, open, or new project. | 8.0 | Released | All Workloads |
| Create multiple instances of the IDE from the Dock. | 8.0 | Released | All Workloads |
| Easily configure multiple startup projects with the new Set Startup Projects solution context menu option. | 8.0 | Released | All Workloads |
| Reduce the number of password prompts on install. | 8.0 | Released | All Workloads |
| Xamarin.Forms 4.0 & Xamarin.Essentials 1.0 templates and tooling support. | 8.0 | Released | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
| Xamarin.Android Designer improvements with support for Sample Data. | 8.0 | Released | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
| Speed up your build and deployment times with our improvements for build and enhanced fast deployment in Xamarin.Android. | 8.0 | Released | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
| Next-generation Dex Compiler(d8) and Code Shrinker(r8) support in Xamarin.Android. | 8.0 | Released | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
2018 Q4 (October-December)
| Feature | Visual Studio for Mac Version | Availability | Workloads or Standalone Installer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Improved performance and reliability of the code editor. | 7.7 and higher | Released | All Workloads |
| Login and activate Visual Studio for Mac when running behind firewalls and proxies. | 7.7 and higher | Released | All Workloads |
| Improved IntelliSense with brace completions, smart indenting and lightbulbs. | 7.7 and higher | Released | All Workloads |
| Publish ASP.NET Core project to a folder. | 7.7 and higher | Released | ASP.NET Core |
| .NET Core 2.2 support. | 7.7 and higher | Released | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core |
| Azure Functions 2.0 support. | 7.7 and higher | Released | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core |
| Azure Functions auto-update for tools and templates. | 8.0 | Released | .NET Core and ASP.NET Core |
| Xamarin.Forms 3.3 with Accessibility Improvements, CSS Improvements, and community contributions. | 7.7 and higher | Released | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
| Initial Xamarin.Android Build Performance Improvements. | 7.7 and higher | Released | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
| Xamarin.Forms 4.0 with Shell workflow. | 8.0 | Released | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
| Xamarin.Forms Previewer improvements. | 8.0 | Released | .NET (Xamarin) Mobile Development |
| Unity debugger performance and reliability improvements. | 8.0 | Released | Unity Game Development |