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Microsoft is Bringing Visual Studio To Mac (techcrunch.com)
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.
Been doing .NET forever and with .NET Core running on macOS now, this is welcome news. Visual Studio Code is nice, but it isn't the solution full Visual Studio is. With full blown Visual Studio, .NET Core, Docker, I won't even need to run VMs anymore on my macbook to get work done.
I'd be happy if software companies who made the mistake of using platform-specific APIs and languages could cross-compile. Are you listening, Intuit?
I've been debating the past few weeks on whether or not to buy a new Windows laptop just so I could run Visual Studio....this solves that problem, thanks Microsoft!
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...
XCode is just buggy as all get out though. It has progressively gotten less stable. The IDE is fantastic, but it has so many issues. Doing Swift 2.3 it is pointing out Swift 3.0 "errors." Functionality just doesn't work (downloading provisioning profiles via Settings). They haven't been maintaining it quality wise as it once was.
I've been using Qt for this purpose for years.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
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.
The original announcement that was the source of the article in the OP has since been pulled; I've seen mention that it was just posted too early. Presumably it will be back at the regularly scheduled time or perhaps earlier when they realise that the genie is out of the bottle.
Sure thing buddy. Add to the list the lack of support for refactoring Swift code. Language has been out two years now and they still don't support BASIC functionality of an IDE.
My all-time favorite IDE was CodeWarrior on classic Mac (the Windows version was the best on that platform at the time.) I tried Visual Studio 6 and wasn't impressed.
Then I had to use VS every day and got used to it. Most of its problems were/are horrific UI design (hidden/obfuscated settings!) and twitchiness (hangs; recreating projects from scratch when they refuse to build.) Overall usability is now quite good, and automation (intellisense, etc) is first rate.
I haven't tried XCode recently, last time it was still a mix of all the things I didn't like about the early VS's. It's free and I could get used to it if I had to work on Mac's: Apple got all the money they will ever get from me between 1986 and 2008 or so. (I still have one MacBook left, mostly running Windows, from the days when I still thought OS X would eventually suck less.)
I'd be delighted to have a modern VS on Macs for odd projects that need a text editor and project manager. I've experimented with Code for fiction writing, not bad (lots of customization.)
Brag about Xcode all you want. But can Xcode do this . . .
Clippy: It looks like you're trying to get useful work done.
Would you like me to help you install Windows 10?
If you would like to have Windows 10 installed, then please do any of the following actions:
1. Click Yes
2. Click No
3. Click Cancel
4. Click the red button in the window's title bar
5. Abruptly disconnect the computer's electrical power to have Windows 10 conveniently installed on the next reboot.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Visual Studio 15, next version not VS2015 which is actually version 14 go Microsoft numbering, is supposed to fix this.
It's broken out so you only install what you need to you'll have to much smaller footprint and patching will be faster. If you do a full install of everything it will probably still be slow. But you'll be able to choose a setup like I want to do just Windows apps in C# and it only installs the bare minimum to make that work.
Yes it is fantastic. I grew up on dbx and xdbx (at least AIX version added wonderful stuff). WinDbg is a frustrating mess of amazing-power coupled to arcane commands. VS lays over this what xdbx did for dbx.
Best VS debugger feature was IntelliTrace (C# / .NET "only" feature). Still need to have the Enterprise or Ultimate license - but if you have it - wow. One can walk code backwards from a break-point looking to answer the inevitable question "how did execution get to this line?"
Although none of the MS tools provides "where" like a dbx/core dump provides (although WinDbg can come close).
For all of the hate that some spew at MS - the one thing they have always been good at is ease of access for complex technology. SQL Server - easy to use. VS - easy to code. Windows 8 - never mind.
According to Ars Technica it is different product
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
I would gladly switch to Visual Studio on Mac since Xcode feels like a straight jacket. I want file-based tabs, not workspace-tabs and Visual Studio gives me proper tabs. If I could develop macOS & iOS apps using Visual Studio, then I'll never need Xcode again :-)
Affordable Apple hardware with quality Microsoft software?
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