I find the naming "Visual Studio for Mac" pretty deceptive, since apparently it is not anything like the win32 VS environment, but instead based on Xamarin Studio. Even the tagline is deceptive: "The IDE you love, now on the Mac".
I would guess this won't let you build/debug win32 or winforms or wpf applications, or install any .vsix extensions from the visual studio marketplace (of which there are lots of useful ones, such as this one to manage translations - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TomEngle... ) - correct me if I'm wrong, but if I can't install my .vsix extensions, this is not "the IDE you love, now on the Mac".
Since there's a PM here from Microsoft, I've got a couple questions regarding the requirement to "sign in with your Microsoft account":
With all your branding changes over the years, what's considered a Microsoft account today? My old Hotmail account, that existed from the days before Microsoft bought Hotmail? I think it's still alive, but I haven't logged in in the better part of a decade to find out. The accounts created over the years for various Xbox machines? I think those are still around, but I doubt I could get into them at this point. The "Live" account I had to create for MSDN many years ago? Once that job and associated need for MSDN ended I've not logged in to see if it's still around.
Which one(s) should I try to find login information for to use?
Furthermore, why must I sign in in the first place for the free version? I can understand signing in to associate the install with a paid version with extra features, but I see no reason to require it for free versions without any paid features.
> My old Hotmail account, that existed from the days before Microsoft bought Hotmail? I think it's still alive, but I haven't logged in in the better part of a decade to find out.
I have some bad news for you...
This is literally the reason I signed up with gmail when it came out. Microsoft used to have a log-in-within-30-days-or-we-delete-everything policy for Hotmail. Maybe it was even 90 days.
Hi there! To answer your first question, it's any of the above :) If you use Hotmail, Outlook.com, Xbox Live, etc. they all are associated with a Microsoft Account. You can also associate your existing e-mail address, which you regularly use with a Microsoft Account, if you prefer that.
As for why, it's really a good way for us to stay in touch with you and keep you updated about what's new, help you get started, and make you successful in general. Visual Studio Community on Windows has the same behavior for the same reasons. Hope that helps!
I've essentially lost my Microsoft account. My password doesn't work, and it wont email me the security code. I try the "alternate email" option, which does work, but when I answer the validation questions it fails -- doesn't believe I am who I say I am, I guess.
And when I try to contact support, it wont let me contact a person unless I login to my Microsoft account...
I used to be a big VB, VC++ fan boy a long time ago. 1995 :-)
Have since move on....
Tried built a few opensource apps with VS once a year for the past few years and found that I can't even compile a single Windows open source packages from github, sourceforge after weeks of trying.
The code might claim to be able to build with VS10, VS12. The dependency libraries will need completely different VS version of .xml, .proj, .sln build systems.
I challenge the PM of VS product try to build a few popular MS projs such as python, VLC, or anything in http://opensourcewindows.org/. Document the process of building the app and dependence library. Compare that to the process of try to build that same packages in Mac (with brew) or in Linux.
In Linux, for all the packages I like play with. "./configure && make" handle most of the the build in a few minutes. Even easier on Ubuntu with apt-get source/build commands. Very similar process in Mac.
Even linux kernel, I can build it easily with pretty much the same 1-2 commands for the past 20 years.
Sounds a bit cherry-picky/anecdotal to me: I regularly build open source projects using multiple versions of VS, and have created some, and it either works out of the box (because the project maintainers spent time on it - both on project system and on portable code) or else at least doesn't take weeks. Likewise on linux/mac: building from source usually works. But also not always (it is better than in 1995 though, where I'd spend hours figuring out exactly which dependency still needed building and hoping I'd find the correct patch etc. Things seem more unified now, at least to me). Also since VS2013 (possibly VS2012 as well, don't have that anymore to test) you can actually have one single project file for any version up to the latest since they all use the same format.
Don't get me wrong: configure/make is way more mature but you almost make it sound like nothing works at all with VS/msbuild which is imo often just because people don't really know how to work with it (which in turn might be because of lack of documentation/proper examples/...), or because project maintainers don't care for VS support, and/or because there is no standard dependency managment (yet? cmake does a pretty good job, vcpkg looks promising).
such as python
Wasn't that just 'msbuild path/to/python.sln'? At least for the core, might be different for other modules. But I definitely remember getting a working python.exe just by building the supplied project files.
They're sort of trying to work on this, see https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg. If things are strictly C++ and build using cmake, then MSVC is okay. Anything autotools or relying on inline assembly or overly complicated makefiles or scientific code that still depends on Fortran numerical libraries is a mess though. Much easier to use mingw-w64 gcc for those - bonus is you can cross compile and not have to do dev on Windows, just test the binaries.
Not to distract from your point but compiling something on Linux has always been a massive pain due to dependencies.
I often have to run configure multiple times and hunt down the correct version of whatever library it needs before re-running it and finding yet another library that it can not find (it gets even worse if you actually have the library installed but it's not in the search path...)
Give me a couple of examples? Python is tied to an older Visual Studio normally. VS12 was different for reasons I can't remember but anything from VS13 onwards (for desktop) should build fine.
I really wish Microsoft had made UWP cross-platform. Would be pretty amazing if I could use UWP/C# to target Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android properly. With UWP being limited to just Windows I don't see it ever being a success.
Is this more than just Xamarin? I'm sorry -- I tried last time and that was the impression I got. I know it says it has asp.net core but can I truly build .net web services based apps now without parallels?
Hi, Rajen Kishna here, Product Manager on Visual Studio for Mac. It definitely is more than Xamarin, we brought in support for creating web apps and services with .NET Core/ASP.NET Core, game development with Unity and C#, and cloud integration with publishing your web apps/services to Azure directly from within the IDE. We're also announcing some preview features coming very soon, including Docker and Azure Functions support, as well as targeting IoT devices like Android Things. Lots of goodies to be had!
The only problem I have with MS's ecosystem is their love to have a lot of concepts and name for everything. I am literally lost and I do not know what .NET/<whatever> is what and how it is used.
My pet MS naming peeve is that they decided that "locale" is not good enough for them and decided to name it "Culture" in .NET, even though it is the exact same thing and "locale", being a rarely used word outside of technical circles, is much more precise.
Hi there! Rajen Kishna, Product Manager on Visual Studio for Mac here. Visual Studio for Mac is a full-featured IDE to create apps, games, and services for mobile, web, and cloud. Creating mobile apps with Xamarin and C# is definitely one of the workloads available, but there's a lot more with .NET Core, Unity, and Azure. You can view .NET Core as the cross-platform implementation of .NET you can code against and share code across apps and web on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Hope that helps clear things up!
Microsoft is trying to mitigate the hemorrhage that is the mass exodus of its customers from Windows to competing operating systems. It's not about "real support" for Linux or Mac. It's a sad attempt to keep people tied to Microsoft products, by enticing you to use these tools even once you've abandoned Windows.
What they should be doing is fixing the critical issues people have with Windows; namely, Windows 10's (lack of) privacy settings, advertisements in Explorer, harassing people with taskbar notifications for using Chrome instead of Edge, and the utter shitstorm they allowed to take place with malware-levels of bullshit with forced and unattended upgrades to Windows 10. With the way in which Microsoft pushed out Windows 10, I can't understand why anyone is still using Windows except for gaming. That maneuver should have cost them so much more than it did. Microsoft has lost all credibility, and trust is unlikely to ever be regained.
tldr; Microsoft Windows' users have had enough of this crap, and are migrating elsewhere. Instead of fixing the issues people have with Windows that are causing them to abandon it, Microsoft is creeping into the competition's ecosystems in some desperate attempt to maintain a partial grasp on its users.
It would be really nice to have a microsoft rep in here to answer questions. Because what I really want is visual studio that can build C++ win32 MFC executables without having to run Windows in a virtual machine. Can it do that? I don't know.
It is based on the MonoDevelop core with many new extensions to support new workloads (.NET Core, Azure Deployment, Unity development).
Additionally, over the past year we have replaced started to replace the internals of MonoDevelop with code from Visual Studio that we have been open sourcing.
In addition to what has been open sourced and integrated so far, we have a strong pipeline of additional features and capabilities that will bring even more Visual Studio code into the IDE.
We are roughly on a 6-8 weeks release cadence that aligns with the Visual Studio release cadence, so you will see various subsystems get new capabilities continuously from this point on.
More than that, if they're willing to deliver a port of Xamarin/MonoDevelop to Mac and call it VS, it's at least funny that they won't do that for Linux. There is no actual need for that, but since they're refactoring Xamarin...
I sincerely would LOVE to have an F# development IDE that didn't ask me to install Mono. I don't have anything against Mono, per se, I just want to see that Microsoft officially supports it across the three major platforms.
They're promoting this as a new dev environment for .NET Core, but there's still ZERO tooling for Razor. I tried starting a simple example project and the .cshtml files didn't even have any syntax highlighting, let alone syntax/type checking.
I don't know how you work on cross-platform ASP.NET for this long and still not have the tooling for your templating engine ported.
I don't understand. I've been using VS on Mac for the past 3 months to develop C# applications for a class of mine. Was that just a beta? What's so different about this?
Visual Studio vs Visual Studio Code. 2 different applications with really similar names. Visual Studio Code is lighter weight - more similar to Sublime/Atom.
Looks like during Xamarin installation: /Users/USER/Downloads/Install Visual Studio.app/Contents/MacOS/Install_Xamarin - Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '-[NSScrollView heightAnchor]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x6080003c0870'
More good news from the MS / Xamarin camp. A few years ago I 'bet the farm' on using Xamarin for Mac to develop a Mac version of our PC application (with shared code in a PCL); since that time Xamarin (and then MS/Xamarin after the buyout) have rarely failed to impress. Kudos to the team.
Any .NET MVC developers here? I always wanted to learn ASP MVC, but never did because I was scared of the deployment situation on Linux. Has anything changed in that regard? Would you say deploying a .NET web app works almost as smooth on Linux as let's say a node.js app?
[+] [-] 0x0|9 years ago|reply
I would guess this won't let you build/debug win32 or winforms or wpf applications, or install any .vsix extensions from the visual studio marketplace (of which there are lots of useful ones, such as this one to manage translations - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TomEngle... ) - correct me if I'm wrong, but if I can't install my .vsix extensions, this is not "the IDE you love, now on the Mac".
[+] [-] jot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fotbr|9 years ago|reply
With all your branding changes over the years, what's considered a Microsoft account today? My old Hotmail account, that existed from the days before Microsoft bought Hotmail? I think it's still alive, but I haven't logged in in the better part of a decade to find out. The accounts created over the years for various Xbox machines? I think those are still around, but I doubt I could get into them at this point. The "Live" account I had to create for MSDN many years ago? Once that job and associated need for MSDN ended I've not logged in to see if it's still around.
Which one(s) should I try to find login information for to use?
Furthermore, why must I sign in in the first place for the free version? I can understand signing in to associate the install with a paid version with extra features, but I see no reason to require it for free versions without any paid features.
[+] [-] BugsJustFindMe|9 years ago|reply
I have some bad news for you... This is literally the reason I signed up with gmail when it came out. Microsoft used to have a log-in-within-30-days-or-we-delete-everything policy for Hotmail. Maybe it was even 90 days.
[+] [-] RajenK|9 years ago|reply
As for why, it's really a good way for us to stay in touch with you and keep you updated about what's new, help you get started, and make you successful in general. Visual Studio Community on Windows has the same behavior for the same reasons. Hope that helps!
[+] [-] legohead|9 years ago|reply
And when I try to contact support, it wont let me contact a person unless I login to my Microsoft account...
[+] [-] yuhong|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wluu|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/visualstudio-docs/blob/master/d... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/synchroniz...
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Siecje|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalleboo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srcmap|9 years ago|reply
Tried built a few opensource apps with VS once a year for the past few years and found that I can't even compile a single Windows open source packages from github, sourceforge after weeks of trying.
The code might claim to be able to build with VS10, VS12. The dependency libraries will need completely different VS version of .xml, .proj, .sln build systems.
I challenge the PM of VS product try to build a few popular MS projs such as python, VLC, or anything in http://opensourcewindows.org/. Document the process of building the app and dependence library. Compare that to the process of try to build that same packages in Mac (with brew) or in Linux.
In Linux, for all the packages I like play with. "./configure && make" handle most of the the build in a few minutes. Even easier on Ubuntu with apt-get source/build commands. Very similar process in Mac.
Even linux kernel, I can build it easily with pretty much the same 1-2 commands for the past 20 years.
[+] [-] stinos|9 years ago|reply
Don't get me wrong: configure/make is way more mature but you almost make it sound like nothing works at all with VS/msbuild which is imo often just because people don't really know how to work with it (which in turn might be because of lack of documentation/proper examples/...), or because project maintainers don't care for VS support, and/or because there is no standard dependency managment (yet? cmake does a pretty good job, vcpkg looks promising).
such as python
Wasn't that just 'msbuild path/to/python.sln'? At least for the core, might be different for other modules. But I definitely remember getting a working python.exe just by building the supplied project files.
[+] [-] tavert|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koyote|9 years ago|reply
I often have to run configure multiple times and hunt down the correct version of whatever library it needs before re-running it and finding yet another library that it can not find (it gets even worse if you actually have the library installed but it's not in the search path...)
[+] [-] voltagex_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] satysin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kraig911|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RajenK|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] migueldeicaza|9 years ago|reply
You can create new projects, debug them and bonus points - deploy directly to Azure.
[+] [-] delegate|9 years ago|reply
From what I can see, it only supports C# (and family), so what good is it to a C++ / OSX dev ?
[+] [-] holydude|9 years ago|reply
So is this just Xamarin repackaged ?
[+] [-] beagle3|9 years ago|reply
My pet MS naming peeve is that they decided that "locale" is not good enough for them and decided to name it "Culture" in .NET, even though it is the exact same thing and "locale", being a rarely used word outside of technical circles, is much more precise.
[+] [-] RajenK|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yread|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] developer2|9 years ago|reply
What they should be doing is fixing the critical issues people have with Windows; namely, Windows 10's (lack of) privacy settings, advertisements in Explorer, harassing people with taskbar notifications for using Chrome instead of Edge, and the utter shitstorm they allowed to take place with malware-levels of bullshit with forced and unattended upgrades to Windows 10. With the way in which Microsoft pushed out Windows 10, I can't understand why anyone is still using Windows except for gaming. That maneuver should have cost them so much more than it did. Microsoft has lost all credibility, and trust is unlikely to ever be regained.
tldr; Microsoft Windows' users have had enough of this crap, and are migrating elsewhere. Instead of fixing the issues people have with Windows that are causing them to abandon it, Microsoft is creeping into the competition's ecosystems in some desperate attempt to maintain a partial grasp on its users.
[+] [-] blowski|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s73ver|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] BugsJustFindMe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spongo2|9 years ago|reply
One thing you could do is register your opinion here: https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/563332-visual-stud...
[+] [-] stevenmays|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zamalek|9 years ago|reply
Isn't this just MonoDevelop? Or have Microsoft added secret sauce to the mix?
[+] [-] migueldeicaza|9 years ago|reply
It is based on the MonoDevelop core with many new extensions to support new workloads (.NET Core, Azure Deployment, Unity development).
Additionally, over the past year we have replaced started to replace the internals of MonoDevelop with code from Visual Studio that we have been open sourcing.
In addition to what has been open sourced and integrated so far, we have a strong pipeline of additional features and capabilities that will bring even more Visual Studio code into the IDE.
We are roughly on a 6-8 weeks release cadence that aligns with the Visual Studio release cadence, so you will see various subsystems get new capabilities continuously from this point on.
[+] [-] 4lch3m1st|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nobleach|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleshweasel|9 years ago|reply
I don't know how you work on cross-platform ASP.NET for this long and still not have the tooling for your templating engine ported.
[+] [-] thom|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vetinari|9 years ago|reply
If yes, JetBrains didn't notice, because they are still able to do that for their products.
[+] [-] pvg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NDT|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrowley|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eksemplar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithly|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blowski|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] migueldeicaza|9 years ago|reply
We will be doing that with the Language Server Protocol effort that was started at Microsoft and is currently in use by VSCode and other languages:
http://langserver.org/
Miguel
[+] [-] legohead|9 years ago|reply
Looks like during Xamarin installation: /Users/USER/Downloads/Install Visual Studio.app/Contents/MacOS/Install_Xamarin - Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '-[NSScrollView heightAnchor]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x6080003c0870'
Bummer.
[+] [-] mb_72|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kapuru|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mihular|9 years ago|reply