Although it’s a new product and doesn’t support all of the Visual Studio project types, for those it does have in common it uses the same MSBuild solution and project format. NET Core apps, and the same designers for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android.Ĭompatibility is a key focus of Visual Studio for Mac. It uses the same debugger engines for Xamarin and. Its IntelliSense and refactoring use the Roslyn Compiler Platform its project system and build engine use MSBuild and its source editor supports TextMate bundles. 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.īelow the surface, Visual Studio for Mac also has a lot in common with its siblings in the Visual Studio family. Its UX is inspired by Visual Studio, yet designed to look and feel like a native citizen of macOS. If you enjoy the Visual Studio development experience, but need or want to use macOS, you should feel right at home. Here’s how Xamarin project manager Mikayla Hutchinson described the tool in the leak on Monday:Īt its heart, Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio. It will hit general availability next year, and Microsoft will eventually sunset Xamarin Studio.

Inheriting from the mobile-centric Xamarin Studio and from Visual Studio for Windows, the IDE is supposed to encourage Mac and iOS developers to use Microsoft’s development tools, since they will no longer need a Windows computer or virtual machine to do so. Now Microsoft is taking the next step: making Visual Studio cross-platform. 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. It’s a big deal, given that Microsoft once made a point of locking in developers by only offering its tools on Windows. Still, a preview of Visual Studio for Mac is now available ( download here, requires OS X El Capitan 10.11 or higher), letting developers write cloud, mobile, and macOS apps on Apple’s desktop operating system using. 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.

Visual studio database for mac