Microsoft Announces Visual Studio For Mac
Microsoft has declared it’s launching its primary coding interface, Visual Studio, on Mac computers. The news may sound boring, but it’s been a long time coming and is a big demonstration for the company, which has previously chosen to lock developers into its platform by keeping coding tools Windows-only.
Microsoft is all set to announce Visual Studio on MacOS at its Connect(); developers' conference this week. The move will appeal to developers who use Mac PCs and who create services and software for multiple platforms. Visual Studio has long been Microsoft's preferred tool for coding and developing Windows software but is also extensively used in the creation of other platforms as well as online services. The move follows Microsoft's earlier release of the Visual Studio Code source editor for Mac, and complements Xamarin Studio, which it developed earlier this year.'
The company explained in its official blog post that this decision will help the platform to become a true cloud-first, mobile-first development tool for C# and .NET. Even though the software works much like how it works on the Windows platform, MacOS users must feel at home. And again not every project type will be supported. Only those projects which can be shared between users in similar formats without any need for migration or conversion are supported.
In current years, Microsoft has been playing well with other platforms. In 2014, it introduced a port of the .Net Core Framework to MacOS and Linux. And earlier this year, it shocked the tech world by bringing the BASH shell, which is generally found on UNIX-like systems, to Windows 10.
Microsoft assurances a high level of feature parity between the Windows and Mac versions of Visual Studio, including the Roslyn Compiler Platform for the MSBuild engine, refactoring, and TextMate for source editing. The C# and F# languages are supported, with the same compilers used by Visual Studio running on Windows. Drag-and-drop design tools, Debug engines and form building tools with live previews are inherited from Xamarin. The company considers that users will primarily see Visual Studio for Mac as a tool to develop Android, iOS, Mac and backend cloud server software.