Microsoft announces Visual Studio for Mac

Reading time icon 2 min. read


Readers help support MSpoweruser. We may get a commission if you buy through our links. Tooltip Icon

Read our disclosure page to find out how can you help MSPoweruser sustain the editorial team Read more

xamarin

Microsoft today announced that they are a new version of Visual Studio for Mac. This is based on Xamarin Studio, but its UX is inspired by Visual Studio on Windows. If don’t want full IDE experience, you can always use Visual Studio Code, a lightweight yet rich standalone source editor.

As you expect from a Visual Studio product, its IntelliSense and refactoring use the Roslyn Compiler Platform. And it uses the same debugger engines for Xamarin and .NET Core apps, and the same designers for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android. For now, it doesn’t support all of the Visual Studio project types, but If you have team members on MacOS and Windows, or switch between the two OSes yourself, you can seamlessly share your projects across platforms. Visual Studio for Mac supports native iOS, Android and Mac development via Xamarin, and server development via .NET Core with Azure integration. It supports C# and F# languages as well.

Visual Studio for Mac is based on the open source MonoDevelop IDE and it has a rich extensibility model. Developers can use to add their own functionality ranging from simple editor commands to entirely new languages and project types.

You can download the preview toay from VisualStudio.com. Read more about this release here.

More about the topics: apps, developers, microsoft, Visual Studio for Mac, Xamarin, Xamarin Studio