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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.

8 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Fantastic by hsmith · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. Can you cross-compile with it? by RogueWarrior65 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  3. 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.

  4. Qt by saider · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been using Qt for this purpose for years.

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    Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
  5. Microsoft pulled the announcement by trawg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Xcode is superior, go away by DickBreath · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

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    I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
  7. Re:The debugger was very good. by ripvlan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.