Microsoft launches finished Visual Studio for Mac with support for all Apple platforms

AppleInsider · May 10, 2017 4:39PM

Microsoft on Wednesday officially launched Visual Studio for Mac, bringing the development suite out of a months-long preview period.

The finished Studio release can be used to create apps for macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS and Android, as well as Web and cloud apps, Microsoft said. Some features include Git integration, an extension system, and multi-platform app templates.

The software's multi-platform capabilities stem from the use of .NET Core and Xamarin, and should take full advantage of platform-specific features. It can also be used develop games based on Unity, one of the most popular commercial game platforms.

Visual Studio was Windows-centric until November, when Microsoft issued the first Mac preview.

In recent years -- under CEO Satya Nadella -- the company has loosened its resistance to supporting non-Windows hardware, so long as it gets people using other Microsoft products. One of the first big motions in this direction was the debut of Office for iPad in 2014.

At the same time the company has pushed deeper into first-party hardware, for instance by premiering the Surface Laptop, Surface Studio, and HoloLens.

All of the core Visual Studio for Mac downloads are free, but professional use may require a paid subscription.

volcan · May 10, 2017 4:50PM

Okay, how do you manage iOS signing identities and provisioning profiles or use the Simulator?

tcat · May 10, 2017 4:58PM

It is just Xamarin Studio rebranded and have nothing to do with the Windows version of Visual Studio. Xamarin Studio have been available on Mac for years.

Do Microsoft actually release anything new other than rebranded products? Just look at their enterprise "xxx for Business" offerings.

[email protected] · May 10, 2017 5:07PM

Yeah, but does it support Swift?

greg uvan · May 10, 2017 5:17PM

So, is this for building Windows apps with a Mac as the development tool? Or is it for building macOS apps using Microsoft's development tools? Or apps for iOS?

StrangeDays · May 10, 2017 5:17PM

Sounds great to me. I'm an enterprise dev and most of my work is C# in VS.NET. The .NET Core subset has been steadily growing with more platform-agnostic libraries and APIs, which is great. Especially if you're building your functionality around services for consumption by other client apps who can be using whatever.

I haven't tried this yet, but I'd be pretty surprised if they don't support Swift. Tho if doing something native to iOS I'd likely still prefer to go w/ Xcode just to remove added layers.

shapetables · May 10, 2017 5:38PM

Maybe Apple will introduce Xcode (iCode?) for Windows 10S at WWDC'17?
If Apple doesn't, IBM probably will.

macplusplus · May 10, 2017 5:41PM

A welcome addition that is expected to accelerate Apple's enterprise penetration, Mac sales and and Mac based game development.

rotateleftbyte · May 10, 2017 6:03PM

How many arms and legs does it cost?
Please don't say $49.99/month.

jamsk · May 10, 2017 6:37PM

Yup, Swift is in there. Need a free extension.

applesauce007 · May 10, 2017 6:41PM

X Code totally rules for iOS / MacOS / tvOS development.

Very few Apple developers will use this for dot net cross platform development.

mytdave · May 10, 2017 6:44PM

Yawn. Let me know when they come out with Mac (and other platforms) versions of Project and Visio. Does anyone actually use VS for any serious development? I know we sure don't, but then again we develop primarily in Linux.

zoetmb · May 10, 2017 6:57PM

mytdave said:

Yawn. Let me know when they come out with Mac (and other platforms) versions of Project and Visio. Does anyone actually use VS for any serious development? I know we sure don't, but then again we develop primarily in Linux.

There is a viewer for Visio for the Mac, but obviously you can't create or edit. If they ever did have a version of Visio for the Mac, I could work from home. I do all my screen mockups in Visio.

bonobob · May 10, 2017 6:58PM

applesauce007 said:

X Code totally rules for iOS / MacOS / tvOS development.

Very few Apple developers will use this for dot net cross platform development.

If VS for Mac makes it possible to use the same source code for iOS, MacOS and Windows, people will use it.

sixcolors · May 10, 2017 7:13PM

mytdave said:

Yawn. Let me know when they come out with Mac (and other platforms) versions of Project and Visio. Does anyone actually use VS for any serious development? I know we sure don't, but then again we develop primarily in Linux.

Yeah, lots of serious development is done in Visual Studio. It's the preeminent IDE for windows. It's got a lot of good features and is many ways is far ahead of other IDEs (Xcode, Android Studios, Eclipse etc).

uroshnor · May 10, 2017 7:49PM

sixcolors said:

mytdave said:

Yawn. Let me know when they come out with Mac (and other platforms) versions of Project and Visio. Does anyone actually use VS for any serious development? I know we sure don't, but then again we develop primarily in Linux.

Yeah, lots of serious development is done in Visual Studio. It's the preeminent IDE for windows. It's got a lot of good features and is many ways is far ahead of other IDEs (Xcode, Android Studios, Eclipse etc).

Unfortunately, VS for Mac is not VS for Windows . The latter is the IDE that meets your description (about having features ahead of other IDE). VS for Mac is simply warmed over Xamarin Studio , and it is a largely unrelated (and vastly inferior) IDE, other than being owned by the same company who have given it the same name.

This isn't unique within Microsoft - Outlook on iOS is also a warmed over 3rd party purchase , that is a completely different codebase to other Microsoft products with the same name. People think they want it by virtue of brand/name association from their windows desktop experience.

StrangeDays · May 10, 2017 8:25PM

applesauce007 said:

X Code totally rules for iOS / MacOS / tvOS development.

Very few Apple developers will use this for dot net cross platform development.

It's the other way 'round -- .NET devs are excited about working directly on macOS on their cross-platform projects. This is preferred to virtualizing a Windows environment simply for Visual Studio, which incurs more battery suckage.

If I can connect to my org's .NET Core-based service catalog, check out files via Git, build and test, and check-back in -- awesome. That's enterprise .NET work, and doing it on a Mac is very welcome indeed.

StrangeDays · May 10, 2017 8:31PM

mytdave said:
Does anyone actually use VS for any serious development? I know we sure don't, but then again we develop primarily in Linux.

Dumb question, then. Of course people use VS for serious work, it's a great IDE and C# is a very popular language. The Swift gang said they liked parts of it and incorporated ideas into Swift. .NET is a major platform for enterprise across multiple industries all over the world. I've deployed products for household-name companies in finance, retail, and energy, as well as local and federal government using .NET. Now that they have a platform-independent subset, .NET Core, it's getting better every release. For example we can build services on our win VMs (hopefully now "or Mac") and deploy to AWS.

StrangeDays · May 10, 2017 8:37PM

uroshnor said:

sixcolors said:

mytdave said:

Yawn. Let me know when they come out with Mac (and other platforms) versions of Project and Visio. Does anyone actually use VS for any serious development? I know we sure don't, but then again we develop primarily in Linux.

Yeah, lots of serious development is done in Visual Studio. It's the preeminent IDE for windows. It's got a lot of good features and is many ways is far ahead of other IDEs (Xcode, Android Studios, Eclipse etc).

Unfortunately, VS for Mac is not VS for Windows . The latter is the IDE that meets your description (about having features ahead of other IDE). VS for Mac is simply warmed over Xamarin Studio , and it is a largely unrelated (and vastly inferior) IDE, other than being owned by the same company who have given it the same name.

If so then hopefully they're strive for (non-Windows) feature parity as soon & often as possible. Time will tell, I guess.

dick applebaum · May 10, 2017 8:41PM

jamsk said:

Yup, Swift is in there. Need a free extension

How about Playgrounds?

How about Clang/LLVM and the specific enhancements to optimize Swift?

maciekskontakt · May 10, 2017 8:48PM

shapetables said:

Maybe Apple will introduce Xcode (iCode?) for Windows 10S at WWDC'17?
If Apple doesn't, IBM probably will.

It was called VisualAge once in '90 and I worked with it. It was much better environment for Windows itself than Visual Studio. You could debug multithreaded applications quite easily and VS did not have basics.

The product is dead and I think IBM is/was more focused on supporting Java Eclipse environment that can be used for coding in different languages, but it has far more support for Java. The similar functions that come free with Eclipse you have to pay a lot of extra money to get for Visual Studio. All code analysis and refactoring in VS is non-existent for free. However, you can develop code for Android and I believe for iOS. Swift, non-Swift, Xcode... what you should know MacOS is C++ developed really.

Microsoft launches finished Visual Studio for Mac with support for all Apple platforms

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