Microsoft Launching 'Visual Studio' Coding Platform for Mac This Week

This is very cool. VS was one of those few areas where the Mac native options just weren't as good. I know people have their favorite IDEs but MS really did do a fantastic job on VS.

"Visual Studio for Mac will allow developers to create Windows apps on Apple's macOS platform"

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.
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It is not a coding platform, it is a development environment.

What do you see as the distinction? Every "development environment" I've ever used has fundamentally been a coding platform.

As a ASP.Net developer, this is fantastic news. Have used Xamarin Studio in the past, and great to see MS taking the mac dev environment seriously!

That's nice! I hope it works better then VBA on OS X...

Microsoft doesn't have a good history of buying and rebranding existing products to target Mac users.
Here's the biggest example:
Skype for Business, which replaced Microsoft Lync.
It was recently released and it's such buggy and incomplete product it couldn't even qualify to be called a beta release.

How are those two even related? Skype for Business was not a product they bought and re-branded. They built a brand new client from scratch to replace Lync 2011 which hadn't received any updates other than bug fixes for years.

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.

This is kind of good news to hear