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After spending months in preview, Microsoft today is officially launching its Visual Studio coding platform for the Mac (via VentureBeat). Visual Studio allows developers to code applications using Microsoft's integrated development environment (IDE) on Apple's macOS platform, which they can sync across both Windows and Mac devices.

Thanks to integration with Xamarin, a cross-platform software development company that Microsoft acquired last year, Visual Studio encourages macOS and iOS developers "to use Microsoft's development tools, since they will no longer need a Windows computer or virtual machine to do so." Xamarin Studio is expected to eventually close for good following a full integration into Microsoft.

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"Developers get a great IDE and a single environment to not only work on end-to-end solutions -- from mobile and web apps to games -- but also to integrate with and deploy to Azure," Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group, said in a statement. "Whether you use C#, F#, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Xamarin or Unity, you'll get a best-in-class development environment, natively designed for the Mac."
Visual Studio has been designed natively for macOS, according to Microsoft, letting developers manage their code hosted by any provider, including GitHub and Visual Studio Team Services. Developers can build, connect, and tune native mobile apps for iOS, macOS, and Android while also having the ability to create web applications thanks to support for ASP.NET Core. In terms of programming languages, the C# and F# languages are supported.

There are three different versions of Visual Studio for Mac that users can download, including Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Professional, and Visual Studio Enterprise. Microsoft markets Community as its free, but "fully-featured," IDE for students and individual developers. Professional targets small teams with subscription benefits, while more "demanding" users and projects with larger scale are suggested to look into Enterprise.

For its cloud subscriptions, there are yearly and monthly options available to users interested in the higher-tier Visual Studio plans. An annual subscription to Visual Studio Professional costs $539/year while a monthly subscription costs $45/month. For Visual Studio Enterprise, users will pay $2,999/year or $250/month. Subscribers will be able to earn small credits back each month for the yearly tiers, contingent on their use of different Azure services.

For a detailed breakdown of the differences between each Visual Studio subscription, including individual licenses, check out the app's new website.

Article Link: Microsoft Officially Launches 'Visual Studio for Mac' With Cross-Platform App Coding
 
currently use VS on win to develop unity apps across web, android, and ios. wanted to do some dev on my mac at home but would prefer to use a dev env and editor same like what i use at work if possible... will download the community edition and see how it goes. Does it support the same plug-ins as the win version? Need the Unity plug-in and resharper.

update: launches incredibly slowly and i don't see any plugins for unity or resharper. the default empty project they created for cross platform dev when i try running it doesn't seem to work either.
 
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Probably works a lot better than Xcode...
XCode is certainly not for amateurs.

I think ordinary users will be able to put together some really useful personal utility apps after a week or two with this SDK. I understand the Community Edition is free.
 
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I use VS on my Mac and it's pretty nice but it's still missing some habit formed features that was on the PC so I expect to see those slowly bridging those gaps.
 
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.Net Core is missing the UI Tookit. Once Microsoft adds it, .Net will become standard cross platform application dev framework. You can now even run SQL Server on Unix/Linux. Microsoft is pushing hard toward the correct direction. Good job!
 
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It is not in the .NET Core Guide.

I think I was looking at the Windows version.

2.Windows Desktop, Universal Windows Apps, Web (ASP.NET), Office 365, Business Applications, Apache Cordova, Azure Stack, C++ Cross-Platform Library Development, Python, Node.js, .NET Core, Docker Tools
[doublepost=1494435830][/doublepost]OK, folks, wait a week. Installation keeps quitting. This never happened to me with Xcode or Swift.

This is Microsoft, after all. Sigh...
 
Another option if you want to also make cross-platform desktop apps with a UI is Xojo. It makes native apps for MacOS, Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi, web and iOS.
 
Someday I should probably start using VS instead of MonoDevelop for working on Unity projects...

Just... MonoDevelop comes with Unity and VS doesn't...
 
Scott Guthrie said:
Whether you use C#, F#, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Xamarin or Unity, you'll get a best-in-class development environment, natively designed for the Mac.

Love that this is happening. Scott is an amazing asset to Microsoft. Not a fan of anything else they've been up to lately, just SQL on Linux and further refinement of the .NET environment, both of which Scott is directly involved with.

Congratulations on bringing C# to more people in the world!
 
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