top | item 12948043

Visual Studio for Mac

664 points| runesoerensen | 9 years ago |msdn.microsoft.com

413 comments

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[+] sctb|9 years ago|reply
Since this was an accidental post (now removed) in advance of the actual announcement and release, we've buried this story. That way we can avoid treating the actual announcement as a duplicate when it happens.
[+] SiVal|9 years ago|reply
So Microsoft is treating the Mac more seriously as a professional platform while Apple is treating it less seriously? I'm not saying this in a snarky way; I mean it literally as a change of corporate strategies in both companies. Microsoft seems to be saying, If you are a pro mainly using the Mac for professional work, we want to do a better job of empowering you, and Apple seems to be saying, If you are a pro mainly using the Mac for professional work, you need to get used to the idea that we are deemphasizing your market--no hard feelings.
[+] Jaruzel|9 years ago|reply
Page has gone. Other people (buried in the comments) have posted the google cache of it, but here is it again for visibility:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Vk2On-...

Maybe a Feature Request for HN, would be for a 'alt' link (that mods update) as part of the clickables under the post title?

[+] robert_tweed|9 years ago|reply
Since popular HN submissions will often hug the site to death, a nice feature would be to automatically check the top 3 caches (archive.org, Coral, Google) immediately on submission, before the page goes live on HN. If the cache doesn't 404, the content could be quickly parsed to check it matches the submission and, if so, automatically include the cache link at the top of the submission page.

This would save people manually posting these all the time and would, in many cases prevent the case where it becomes impossible to retrieve a cache, because nobody thought to access one before the slashdot effect occurs. Or, as in this case it seems, the article is pulled.

It would also be nice if, 24-48 hours after submission, the only cache link remaining is archive.org (if they have the page), so the content is retained permanently as-submitted. It's rare, but sometimes a page will be updated so the comments no longer make sense.

It would also be nice to include a link history in the same area (have requested this before), in case the original submission is changed by the mod. Usually when this happens the notice is the top comment, but sometimes it isn't and the discussion can be quite confusing as a result.

[+] maykr|9 years ago|reply
So as for now it is the rebranded and polished Xamarin Studio - hopefully, they have improved it's usability as in the past it was pretty lacking compared to VS 2013/2015
[+] BoysenberryPi|9 years ago|reply
I'm glad to see more Microsoft dev tools on other platforms but don't lose sight of why this is happening. Microsoft is shifting their business to the cloud. They make their money off Azure and other services. In other words, they are making their money mainly off of developers now and its in their best interest to get on the good side of devs which is why they suddenly have a vested interest in open sourcing tools and helping Mac/Linux. Given the love and lavish praise I see heaped on Microsoft in every thread they do something it's clearly working. I'm not saying don't praise them when they do something good but don't be deceived into thinking they are doing it out of good faith.
[+] madeofpalk|9 years ago|reply
> don't lose sight of why this is happening. Microsoft is shifting their business to the cloud.

Why is this a bad thing? Microsoft is a company, they exist to make money. A huge new market for them is 'Cloud' and they're doing everything they can to make that as appealing as possible.

[+] ocdtrekkie|9 years ago|reply
No business operates out of "good faith". For a long time, people treated Google like it was a nonprofit with all of the talk about making the world a better place, rather than recognizing it as, first and foremost, an ad company. As you point out, making people like your company is just good business, and successful businesses do that.
[+] hiram112|9 years ago|reply
What's the long-term business goal for Azure lock-in? If .Net runs as well on Linux as it does on Windows, then there really is no reason to use Azure over any other cloud provider like AWS where generic CentOS or Ubuntu boxes are no different than their Azure counterparts.

Back when .Net was Windows only, they gave it away because the goal was the developers would pay a lot of money for MSDN, GUI apps on Windows, SQL Server, Office, and Sharepoint integration, etc. But .Net core is mostly server side, so I'm having trouble figuring why they'd bother giving away VS to Mac users without being forced to run on Azure in production.

[+] UK-AL|9 years ago|reply
Literally every business does this. Apple Google
[+] kriro|9 years ago|reply
Most interesting part for me:

"""For the functional programmers among you, it includes excellent F# support, powered by the same F# compiler used in Visual Studio."""

I've heard that F# is great from multiple people I trust a lot (and a quick cross check showed it does indeed look very cool) so I might give it a try once this is released.

I do some C# development (Unity Engine stuff) on my Powerbook so this is also good news (MonoDevelop is fine but I'll obviously test VS for Mac)

[+] jpalomaki|9 years ago|reply
Interesting, but I can also see some risks with their approach. Now they have three different Visual Studios with completely different technology stacks.

1) Visual Studio for Windows (C++, I assume?)

2) Visual Studio Code (Javascript, Atom)

3) Visual Studio for Mac (C#)

[+] Kipters|9 years ago|reply
Visual Studio for Windows is written in C# with WPF, but your point is still valid since they are two different codebases
[+] thebeardedone|9 years ago|reply
Hmm I have been googling for the last 15 minutes to find the difference between visual studio and visual studio code and cant seem to find a concrete answer. I thought yours was actually a hint at what it is aimed for but when you go to:

http://code.visualstudio.com/

it actually says it supports c++,c#... I still dont get what the difference is..

Having only ever developed on linux I am actually slightly excited to use an IDE like visual studio after seeing some people at work use it..

[+] cwyers|9 years ago|reply
But if you're writing C# in any of them, you're using the Roslyn compiler and its attendant services, so you get the same IntelliSense, you can share the same project files, etc.
[+] Jaruzel|9 years ago|reply
Visual Studio for Windows is mainly written in C# I believe.
[+] wkoszek|9 years ago|reply
I can't recognise this new Microsoft. It's basically as if this was a new company wrt. Open Source and competing.
[+] static_noise|9 years ago|reply
It's just another corporation doing its thing to stay in business.

They ran into a dead end and changed the strategy. They can change it again. Utimately, money decides.

[+] B1FF_PSUVM|9 years ago|reply
They now want to be Oracle in place of ORCL.
[+] delegate|9 years ago|reply
This is nice of course, but without C++ support it has very little appeal to me.

I don't want to learn C# to write iOS apps. I might learn it just for fun, but I will continue writing the iOS apps with Swift/Objective-C and C++.

C++ support is the weak spot of Xcode and so far I haven't found a suitable IDE for C++, except maybe Qt Creator and several IntelliJ-based IDEs, which are ok but not on par with Visual Studio on Windows.

I keep a windows machine around mainly for writing C++ code (and games!).

[+] philliphaydon|9 years ago|reply
Why don't you want to learn c# for iOS / Android development?
[+] 0xFFC|9 years ago|reply
Me too exactly, If I am doing something open source, then I use Emacs, but for developing projects I have windows machine just for visual studio.
[+] pjmlp|9 years ago|reply
> I haven't found a suitable IDE for C++,

I like to use Eclipse CDT or Netbeans when I am on UNIX.

[+] anupshinde|9 years ago|reply
This is great news! I was a c# developer for many years and absolutely loved it. But then I gave up the Microsoft ecosystem 7 years back just because it felt like a lock-in and also a bit backward compared to non-MS tech.

But in the past one year, Microsoft has got me in again: a. Moved to TypeScript from JavaScript (including my hobby projects) b. Moved to VSCode from Sublime c. C# is a great language and I just hate Java. Hope this and more steps make it easy to use C# and deploy in non-MS environments.

[+] Clubber|9 years ago|reply
C# is a lot different today than it was 7 years ago. You might be in for a shock. The nice thing is you can develop it today as you did 7 years ago, but with heavy use of lambdas and var, it reads almost like another language.
[+] relics443|9 years ago|reply
Microsoft just continues to amaze. Never thought I'd see this...
[+] chenster|9 years ago|reply
Where's the download for Preview? It's not in https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/
[+] runesoerensen|9 years ago|reply
Probably won't be available before the Connect conference next week (November 16-18).

> At Connect(); in November, Microsoft is launching a preview of Visual Studio for Mac.

[+] rl3|9 years ago|reply
>At its heart, Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio.

Does it have a monolithic install and update process that's essentially a slow, bloated black box? That's my main turn-off with Visual Studio on Windows, and even more so with Windows itself.

As soon as Microsoft figures out efficient installation and updates via CLI without the need to reboot, they'll dominate the developer space (and perhaps server market, where reboots are even more problematic).

[+] alkonaut|9 years ago|reply
The statement "macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio" is essentially false as far as I can see, the core of VS for mac is Xamarin Studio which is not Visual Studio.

Visual Studio for windows has two different "cores": the massive old C++/COM-based application used since forever, and the newer subsystems Such as The language subsystem (For C# and VB) Roslyn, which is .NET based.

Xamarin Studio could be using Roslyn, but the app isn't based on the same platform as VS itself is. Since it is at it's core a newer and much smaller application, it shouldn't have to have any of the setup issues that VS has (just like VS code doesn't).

[+] alex4Zero|9 years ago|reply
It is based on Xamarin Studio. I work with XS on OSX last 3 years. Unfortunatelly, Xamarin Studio has a lot of issues with performance, refactoring, it crashes from time to time.

I think it will be better to wait for release of Project Rider. At least EAP is already available

[+] simooooo|9 years ago|reply
Waiting for it to bring core support then I'll be trying it
[+] tonyedgecombe|9 years ago|reply
For a moment I got all excited and thought they had ported WPF to OS/X.
[+] elcct|9 years ago|reply
As someone who wrote quite sized WPF application in hope that WPF will be in future be cross-platform I had a minute of silence.
[+] moljacsharp|9 years ago|reply
No way. WPF is too tightly bound to DirectX. Yes there are a lot of requests to do so, but effort is enormous.

Though there are projects that might indicate something (SkiaSharp and VulcanSharp) on mono project github organisation.

[+] willtim|9 years ago|reply
I get the impression that WPF is pretty much on life support.
[+] partycoder|9 years ago|reply
It's a rebranded Xamarin Studio (MonoDevelop).

I wonder if it will continue to support Android, or if there will be a Linux release.

[+] tangue|9 years ago|reply
Visual Studio for python is really great. Any hints the Python tools will be ported/compatible with the Mac version ?
[+] jeffwass|9 years ago|reply
I'm curious if you've tried Visual Studio Code for Python on Mac?

I've heard good things about it, and just this past weekend tried it out, but couldn't even get a simple Hello World working on it for Python.

I installed the common Python extension for it (Don Jayamanne's), but seems like it couldn't Link with the Python toolset. Ie, I could edit scripts with Python highlighting and autocomplete, but couldn't get them to execute. I gave up after an hour of trying and went back to pycharm.

I'd be interested in giving it another go, but worried if I'm needing to bang my head just for a Hello World, how bad it might get later on.

[+] ldev|9 years ago|reply
Did the hell just froze over? That is one thing I never expected.

.NET open source and officialy supported on *nix, some version of SQL Server on Linux, cross platform Visual Studio Code editor, now Visual Studio for macOS...

[+] cocoadev2000|9 years ago|reply
Its a shame the UI is not Cocoa but GTK. =(
[+] 0xFFC|9 years ago|reply
It is also quite funny, think about it, in some situation maybe Microsoft will end up contributing directly to Gtk !

Unbelievable.

[+] Hydraulix989|9 years ago|reply
This is absolutely amazing. C# has always been a great language, except the .NET ecosystem (sans Mono) has always revolved around Windows only.

Next up, when is VS for Linux?

[+] mb_72|9 years ago|reply
Indeed. I've been using XS on Mac and VS on PC to build a cross-platform product - with shared code for 'core' calculations + view model stuff and dedicated GUI pieces for each platform - for a couple of years now, and I've been sometimes very frustrated by the restrictions of XS compared to VS; it made the Mac side of things much slower to develop. This, and other recent moves by Microsoft with respect to Xamarin, have made me happy (and, yes, somewhat relieved), that I 'bet the company' on this kind of architecture.

There doesn't appear to much demand for our product on Linux - it's targeted towards quite a conservative and on-tech market - but Linux support would also be very welcome.