Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft is Bringing Visual Studio To Mac (techcrunch.com)

Posted by msmash on from the new-Microsoft dept.

Microsoft will finally bring Visual Studio, a "true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for .NET and C#," to Mac later this month, the company has said. From a report on TechCrunch:The IDE is very similar to the one found on Windows. In fact, that is presumably the point. By making it easy for OS X users to switch back and forth between platforms, Microsoft is able to ensure coders can quickly become desktop agnostic or, barring that, give Windows a try again. From the release: "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.

4 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. The worst by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    I guess this is what you could call "the worst of both worlds".

  2. Disclaimer certainty by DaveM753 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Probable disclaimer from Microsoft:

    Users of Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac OSX may find certain features of Visual Studio do not function as expected under the Mac OSX platform. For those users, we recommend using Visual Studio on a Microsoft Windows-based platform, to improve reliability.

    Translation:

    You didn't really expect us to write quality software for a competing OS that didn't eventually drive you over to Windows, did you? Silly user...

    1. Re:Disclaimer certainty by dontbemad · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sounds like Microsoft would be taking a play right out of Apple's book.

  3. What's Good About Visual Studio? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I usual Visual Studio from version 6 to 2010 for MFC development and found it got worse and worse with each new version. The interface turned into a train wreck and reduced your productivity and made it unpleasant to work with. The install size became absurd with it installing a lot of crap you didn't want (even if you unchecked all components the install size was still 8GB). Despite the insane bloat it lacked basic functionality (why wasn't something like Visual Leak Detector included as standard?). Furthermore, Microsofted treated C++ as a second class citizen while they focused on crap like .NET and HTML+Javascript.

    In the end I got sick of it all and now use Qt in Qt Creator. Microsoft's development strategy appears to be "continue development until the product is unusable". They've done this with Windows, Office and Visual Studio. I'm therefore left wondering why any Mac user would want Visual Studio? Surely people have switched to a Mac because they're sick of Microsoft's ever-worsening software.