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Microsoft Launching 'Visual Studio' Coding Platform for Mac This Week
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The current Xamarin Studio for OS X, which this looks identical to from the screenshot, does support WinForms on OS X. I see no reason for them to pull that feature; I would be disappointed if they did because I've been maintaining a port of a Windows app for the past 4 years that wraps some WinForms dialogs inside of a Cocoa container for partially-native support. The WinForms support is sluggish and sometimes has minor visual glitches, but is largely complete.
If you want to develop a macOS app from scratch in C#, they recommend Xamarin.Mac which lets you bind native Cocoa controls and use Xcode's Interface Builder. Creating a native UI for each platform is the recommended approach. I have done a few multi-platform apps in C# and it's not too bad as long as you keep the UI code in separate projects from the backend logic.
This will be the 2nd rebranding of the app in a few years. 3 years ago the official MonoDevelop downloads for OS X were re-branded as Xamarin Studio. Now it's being rebranded again as Visual Studio. If you build it from source code, the UI is virtually identical but still has the original MonoDevelop branding.
Yes, the current Xamarin Studio supports ASP.NET projects.
I don't know if this is ASP.NET Core (the multi-platform version) or legacy ASP.NET though. I would assume ASP.NET Core, which is also supported by Visual Studio Code.
I'm assuming we'll get more details on Wednesday when they actually announce it during the developer conference.
Microsoft doesn't have a good history of buying and rebranding existing products to target Mac users.
Here's the biggest example:
Skype for Business, which replaced Microsoft Lync.
It was recently released and it's such buggy and incomplete product it couldn't even qualify to be called a beta release.
Here's the biggest example:
Skype for Business, which replaced Microsoft Lync.
It was recently released and it's such buggy and incomplete product it couldn't even qualify to be called a beta release.
Of course, right after my current programming class switches from the VS portion of the course to MATLAB. 
Could've saved myself making a Windows partition on my rMBP.(I don't like doing coding on the small screen of my SP4)
Could've saved myself making a Windows partition on my rMBP.(I don't like doing coding on the small screen of my SP4)
It's just MonoDevelop with a different name, not an actual port of Visual Studio.
That's been possible for years.
--Eric
How are those two even related? Skype for Business was not a product they bought and re-branded. They built a brand new client from scratch to replace Lync 2011 which hadn't received any updates other than bug fixes for years.
Skype for Business doesn't really have anything to do with Skype other than branding. It's still a private IM network for businesses based on the same SIP based Lync protocol that they've used from the beginning. On Windows they didn't even bother to write a new client, they just re-branded the existing one and you can even switch the UI back to Lync with a Windows registry key. The new SFB Mac client isn't great, but I'm glad they put effort into re-writing the whole thing. That usually means they'll have people who are familiar with it enough to keep it better maintained. On the other hand, the new client appears to be written in Swift, which could mean they used a lot of new people on it since the language itself is so new. That could explain why there are issues with it. Hopefully they get resolved soon.
I checked out the new Visual Studio Mac Preview since it was officially released today. Early impressions:
- The installer still downloads and installs over a gig of Android SDK stuff, even if you uncheck Xamarin.Android in the installer.
- It has a dark theme, like the Windows version does. I really like that, Xamarin Studio didn't have one.
- They actually removed this from Xamarin Studio a while ago and I never noticed, but there's no WinForms project template available. You CAN still open, compile and run WinForms projects on Visual Studio Mac. Of course, as before this uses Mono's WinForms implementation, and any native Win32 calls won't work.
- The IDE default was re-arranged compared to Xamarin Studio. The solution explorer is now on the right instead of the left, like it is in Visual Studio for Windows.
- There is new icons and branding, the latter which is expected since it's now Visual Studio.
Does Help > Report a Problem work for anyone? It does absolutely nothing here. If it opens your browser, can you please share the URL that it points to?
Edit: It's a known issue.
Edit: It's a known issue.
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They know some devs are on mac os. VM's are great for mixing things up. Convenience of not having to fire up the vm to run VS....will be liked for sure. Once in while they throw us some bones.
Could get a few more sales from newly interested folks. Why don't you write code for Us asks windows. No tools for mac or...or Linux. Now there will be.
Tinfoil...be kind of funny for c(++) if this preferred over xcode. M$ could say lol, all your c coders are belong to us.
Now the big question I have and will see later on I guess....will this give us the full intel compiler and tool hook up. Currently with xcode you get c and fortran from intel. Linux and windows....much more full selection beyond this Compilers, some performance libraries is what xcode gets now. Now if this VS gets the full intel suite support in time....that would be really interesting.
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