- According to the release, 'At its heart, Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio.
- Visual Studio for Mac is a new member of the Visual Studio family, enabling developers on macOS to build apps for mobile, web, and cloud with Xamarin and.NET Core, as well as games with Unity.
Thanks to integration with Xamarin, a cross-platform software development company that Microsoft acquired last year, Visual Studio encourages macOS and iOS developers 'to use Microsoft’s development tools, since they will no longer need a Windows computer or virtual machine to do so.' Xamarin Studio is expected to eventually close for good following a full integration into Microsoft.
“Developers get a great IDE and a single environment to not only work on end-to-end solutions — from mobile and web apps to games — but also to integrate with and deploy to Azure,” Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group, said in a statement. “Whether you use C#, F#, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Xamarin or Unity, you’ll get a best-in-class development environment, natively designed for the Mac.”Visual Studio has been designed natively for macOS, according to Microsoft, letting developers manage their code hosted by any provider, including GitHub and Visual Studio Team Services. Developers can build, connect, and tune native mobile apps for iOS, macOS, and Android while also having the ability to create web applications thanks to support for ASP.NET Core. In terms of programming languages, the C# and F# languages are supported.
There are three different versions of Visual Studio for Mac that users can download, including Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Professional, and Visual Studio Enterprise. Microsoft markets Community as its free, but 'fully-featured,' IDE for students and individual developers. Professional targets small teams with subscription benefits, while more 'demanding' users and projects with larger scale are suggested to look into Enterprise.
For its cloud subscriptions, there are yearly and monthly options available to users interested in the higher-tier Visual Studio plans. An annual subscription to Visual Studio Professional costs $539/year while a monthly subscription costs $45/month. For Visual Studio Enterprise, users will pay $2,999/year or $250/month. Subscribers will be able to earn small credits back each month for the yearly tiers, contingent on their use of different Azure services.
For a detailed breakdown of the differences between each Visual Studio subscription, including individual licenses, check out the app's new website.
Guides
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. Visual Studio Professional 2017 for Mac Improve productivity with professional developer tools and services to build applications for Android, iOS, macOS, cloud and the web. Please see the Release Notes for more information.
Microsoft’s Mikayla Hutchinson (ex Xamarin) has announced Visual Studio for the Mac. This is an exciting development, evolving the mobile-centric Xamarin Studio IDE into a true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for.NET and C#, and bringing the Visual Studio development experience to the Mac.
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WintellectSoftware Development Companynews | Nov 14, 2016by Paul Ballard
Using Visual Studio On Mac
In a month of many surprises, Microsoft has one more for developers everywhere: It’s finally bringing Visual Studio to Mac.
A preview version of Visual Studio for Mac will debut at this week’s Connect conference, according to a blog post the company published and later deleted. (Thanks to our friends over at Engadget for saving a cached version.)
Based on Xamarin technology, the Mac version of Microsoft’s integrated development environment is primarily designed to support development for iOS, Android and Mac, as well as server development via .NET Core. It’s powered by C# and includes F# support.
With Mac and Windows versions of Visual Studio available, developers working on different platforms will be able to collaborate on projects without converting files. Microsoft is also promising a companion Mac version of Visual Studio Code, the streamlined version of VS for quickly editing source code.
The move to make Microsoft’s integrated development environment available to Mac users is the latest sign of the company’s new platform-agnostic, cloud-focused strategy.
Visual Studio Community
“This is an exciting development, evolving the mobile-centric Xamarin Studio IDE into a true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for .NET and C#, and bringing the Visual Studio development experience to the Mac,” reads the blog post.
Microsoft does note that Visual Studio for Mac is a new product and not all Visual Studio project types will be supported in the preview version.