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Microsoft Announces Visual Studio For Mac (venturebeat.com)
On the sidelines of major announcements such as Microsoft joining the Linux Foundation, and Google joining the .NET Foundation, at its Connect(); 2016 developer conference, Microsoft also announced that it bringing Visual Studio for rival platform Mac. The company also announced a preview of the next version of SQL Server, and a preview of Azure App Service support for containers. From a Venture Beat report:"We want to help developers achieve more and capitalize on the industry's shift toward cloud-first and mobile-first experiences using the tools and platforms of their choice," Microsoft Cloud and enterprise executive vice president Scott Guthrie said in a statement. "By collaborating with the community to provide open, flexible, and intelligent tools and cloud services, we're helping every developer deliver unprecedented levels of innovation." The fact that Microsoft is bringing its IDE to macOS would have arguably been the biggest news of the day, had the company not leaked the information itself earlier this week. Still, a preview of Visual Studio for Mac is now available, letting developers write cloud, mobile, and macOS apps on Apple's desktop operating system using .NET and C#. It's a big deal, given that Microsoft once made a point of locking in developers by only offering its tools on Windows. This has changed over time, with a big highlight in April 2015 when Microsoft launched Visual Studio Code, its cross-platform code editor, for Windows, Mac, and Linux.More info on Microsoft releasing SQL Server Preview for Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
https://apple.slashdot.org/sto...
I was all set to change over to using Microsoft cloud based technologies, but was completely hung up over the fact that VS wasn't available for the Mac. Thank you Microsoft!
/sarcasm
In related news, Hitler announced that he will be sharing concentration camp design with the British so that they can start cleaning up their cities too.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Heres a link to the story from two days ago
https://apple.slashdot.org/story/16/11/14/1250212/microsoft-is-bringing-visual-studio-to-mac
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Since when anymore?
It has about as much in common with Visual Studio as "Universal Windows Apps" have in common with real programs.
Microsoft used to have compilers for other platforms. They stopped supporting them when they tried to unify everyone on Windows back in the 80s and 90s.
Microsoft's revenue is still driven by Office and Windows.
Why would you support other platforms with dev tools? It discourages people from writing for Windows to make it too easy to write to the Macintosh. In context, Microsoft has also made it undesirable to have Windows 10 in at least its consumer iteration due to the spyware and the confused interface. So on the one hand, you're driving the users off your platform, and on the other hand, you're facilitating moving the software they depend on to another platform. This seriously does not make sense from a profit generating perspective.
The only way I can make sense of this is that they don't see owning a platform, its dev tools and the primary application software on that platform to be logical for them because they don't think that desktop computing will last. It'll be supplanted by mobile, which they failed to own the platform thereof. Therefore, they want to shove their dev tools and applications in every space they can.
I don't see this as the likely end game, though. I really don't see desktop computing going away in the near term.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Windows is a relatively small portion of Microsoft's revenue now. They see huge potential in the cloud (and that is Nadella's specialty, what he did before becoming CEO), so that is the point of all that they are doing. They've been trying to draw users into their cloud, and will do it with many different enticements.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Note that this is not a port of Microsoft's Visual Studio to the Mac. All they did was buy Xamarin Studio a few months back and slap their nameplate on it. They are completely different products with different codebases, and look to remain that way.
From a technical standpoint, there's not really much reason to be exited about this, unless you were already a Xamarin fan, and want to see it better-supported.
http://www.mainsoft.com/conten...
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Move every "zig"! Mac base are belong to us!
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Apple getting closer and closer to Microsoft practices, MS feels comfortable developing for the Mac.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The Macintosh is not a 'rival platform' to Windows, except in the fervid eyes of the Macintosh advocates.
Microsoft produced Excel and Word for the Mac before there was even a Windows to create Office to run on. In the early days Microsoft obtained a LOT of revenue from the Mac, some even say Microsoft earned more profit for each Mac sold into a business office back then than Apple did.
Nobody really cares about the Mac OS except for Apple enthusiasts. It's not seen as a 'rival' by Microsoft. It's a little niche that they sell into and make money from.
That's great. Use the Mainsoft product, and porting VS code to the Mac only takes 6 months, instead of the usual 18 months. That's far better than a cross-platform tool with compiler switches, etc.
Gee, I wonder how much 'telemetry' (read as: spyware, malware, trojans) Visual Studio has in it's runtime package that it links into your code when you compile it? That'd be one way to start subverting and annexing Apple.
"Build apps for the cloud, iOS, Android, macOS, and wearables."
Great, cannot even build a Windows app. Count me out.
Vim is all you need
Hopefully they do better than they did with Outlook. Mac users won't be thrilled with getting 70% of a product.
If it wasn't for my company using Outlook, I wouldn't even be aware that MS was still in business. I don't think I've used any other MS product in 10+ years. That's pretty crazy to think about since for the first 10+ years I was using computers the majority of the software I used was from MS.
Microsoft needs to get Visual Studio on another platform. Their last desktop OS, Windows 7, is approaching end of life, and after that they only have touch operating systems (Windows 8 and 10). I do know one guy who used Visual Studio on a Surface tablet, but that's not something I can see most developers do.
As a .NET developer myself, I've been looking at getting a new laptop, and got the Dell XPS 13 recommended. Guess what, the current version available in stores is the new Kaby Lake version, which supports only Windows 10. So I'm stuck on and old Windows 7 laptop until I can get Visual Studio on a different desktop OS, such as OSX. I'm not going to try developing on IOS or Windows 10, that's for sure.
That already exists, released a year ago:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...
That feature is based on Xamarin technology, a company they wholly bought out about 6 months ago.
This does mean you have to use a .NET language to target iOS, but I'll take C# over Objective C any day, and F# vs Swift is pretty much a toss-up.