Microsoft Announces Visual Studio for Mac

Microsoft has announced that it is launching a preview of Visual Studio for Mac at Connect(). In a blog post which appears to have been published a little early, Microsoft says Visual Studio for Mac evolves the mobile-centric Xamarin Studio IDE into a true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for .NET and C#.

At its heart, Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio. If you enjoy the Visual Studio development experience, but need or want to use macOS, you should feel right at home. Its UX is inspired by Visual Studio, yet designed to look and feel like a native citizen of macOS. And like Visual Studio for Windows, it’s complemented by Visual Studio Code for times when you don’t need a full IDE, but want a lightweight yet rich standalone source editor.

Visual Studio for Mac's IntelliSense and refactoring use the Roslyn Compiler Platform; its project system and build engine use MSBuild; and its source editor supports TextMate bundles. It uses the same debugger engines for Xamarin and .NET Core apps, and the same designers for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android.


Although Visual Studio for Mac is a new product and doesn’t support all of the Visual Studio project types, for those it does have in common it uses the same MSBuild solution and project format. If you have team members on macOS and Windows, or switch between the two OSes yourself, you can seamlessly share your projects across platforms.

The preview of Visual Studio for Mac should be available later this week. Hit the link below to learn more.

Read More [via Verge]