Microsoft plans to launch its integrated developer environment Visual Studio for the Mac later this week, turning its cloud-first development program into a cross-platform experience that developers can use on both Mac and Windows. Although the official press release has since been deleted, TechCrunch spotted the news and noted that the launch of Visual Studio on the Mac is expected to happen during the Connect() conference this week.
Visual Studio for Mac will allow developers to create Windows apps on Apple's macOS platform, with the use of cloud platforms like Microsoft's Azure and Amazon Web Services to keep work stored across devices. Microsoft called Visual Studio for Mac a "counterpart" to its Windows version, and said that any Windows user "should feel right at home."
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 on the Mac is said to run Microsoft's .NET software framework and include the programming language of C#. The Microsoft Connect() 2016 developer conference is set to run later this week, from November 16-18, so an official announcement from Microsoft about Visual Studio on the Mac is likely to happen sometime during the event.
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I'm not sure why I'd want to do that. I might be interested in using .NET to build Mac apps, but if I need to build Windows apps, I'd probably just get a Windows machine (just like I'd get a Mac to build Mac or iOS apps).
"any Windows user 'should feel right at home.'"
Seems like they should have been aiming to make Mac users feel "right at home", since Windows users would presumably just use the Windows version of Visual Studio.
[doublepost=1479135945][/doublepost]What do you see as the distinction? Every "development environment" I've ever used has fundamentally been a coding platform.
Skype for Business doesn't really have anything to do with Skype other than branding. It's still a private IM network for businesses based on the same SIP based Lync protocol that they've used from the beginning. On Windows they didn't even bother to write a new client, they just re-branded the existing one and you can even switch the UI back to Lync with a Windows registry key. The new SFB Mac client isn't great, but I'm glad they put effort into re-writing the whole thing. That usually means they'll have people who are familiar with it enough to keep it better maintained. On the other hand, the new client appears to be written in Swift, which could mean they used a lot of new people on it since the language itself is so new. That could explain why there are issues with it. Hopefully they get resolved soon.
I checked out the new Visual Studio Mac Preview since it was officially released today. Early impressions:
* The installer still downloads and installs over a gig of Android SDK stuff, even if you uncheck Xamarin.Android in the installer.
* It has a dark theme, like the Windows version does. I really like that, Xamarin Studio didn't have one.
* They actually removed this from Xamarin Studio a while ago and I never noticed, but there's no WinForms project template available. You CAN still open, compile and run WinForms projects on Visual Studio Mac. Of course, as before this uses Mono's WinForms implementation, and any native Win32 calls won't work.
* The IDE default was re-arranged compared to Xamarin Studio. The solution explorer is now on the right instead of the left, like it is in Visual Studio for Windows.
* There is new icons and branding, the latter which is expected since it's now Visual Studio.
Aside from those things, it's still very much the same tool as MonoDevelop & Xamarin Studio so anyone who used either of the previous two can probably just switch.