Visual Studio via Remote Desktop - I have a laptop running Windows/Visual Studio with a static IP and use the Microsoft Remote Desktop client to connect from my Mac. This has the advantage of minimal overhead on the Mac, so is more responsive than a VM. In general terms Visual Studio for Mac is an integrated Macintosh development environment for C# and F# applications that run on iOS, Android, and Mac targets, with a variety of application forms.
Microsoft today releases Visual Studio 2017 and the fourth preview of Visual Studio for Mac. The latest official version of its longstanding IDE for Windows adds improvements related to productivity, performance, mobile apps, cloud development, DevOps and the ecosystem surrounding Visual Studio.
Visual Studio 2017, according to Microsoft's blog post announcing the release, features an improved startup and project load times, better navigation, the ability to edit files without having to open a project or solution, CMake support and Linux support for C++, Xamarin Forms Previewer, a new Connected Services experience, the ability to build .NET Core 1.0 and .NET Core 1.1 apps, support for Azure App Service and more.
What it doesn't include is the data science workload that's part of Visual Studio 2015. Microsoft says that will be added in a later update, which will also include support for the R programming language.
Microsoft says that Visual Studio 2017 can be installed alongside an existing Visual Studio installation (2012, 2013 or 2015) or as an upgrade to a Visual Studio 2015 preview or Visual Studio 2017 release candidate. For the complete list of changes and what to expect, check the link in the second paragraph.
Visual Studio 2017 is available to download now in three editions -- Community, Professional and Enterprise -- from visualstudio.com. The Community version is available for free to open-source and individual devs as well as to students, while the Professional and Enterprise editions are offered as a trial.
A subscription for Professional runs for $539 per year ($45 per month) while the Enterprise edition can be had for $2,999 per year (or $250 per month). Both of the premium editions include additional perks, such as Azure credits.
Visual Studio for Mac Preview 4, as it's referred to by Microsoft, comes with the new features and bug fixes part of Xamarin Studio 6.3, memory and performance enhancements, improved .NET Core support and lots and lots of bug fixes.
To install it on your Mac, you need to be on OS X 10.11 El Capitan or macOS Sierra 10.12. It can be installed alongside Xamarin Studio, but Microsoft notes that you need to use a workaround. You can read more about it by clicking the link in the paragraph above.
Visual Studio for Mac is also available to download from visualstudio.com
Visual Studio for Mac is something that many Microsoft developers have sought for more than a decade. As Mac OS X became interesting in the early 2000s, coders who spent most of their days working in Visual Studio on Windows wondered why they couldn’t use the same languages, frameworks, and tools for the Mac, rather than needing to learn Objective-C, Cocoa, and Xcode, all of which were substantially different from the languages and tools for Windows development.
![For For](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125856582/741310492.png)
Many of us thought the ECMA standards for C# and the .Net Framework, and the Mono project spearheaded by Miguel de Icaza (first at Ximian, then Novell, then Xamarin, and finally at Microsoft), might provide a path to a unified development platform. I for one had no idea it would take so long, although I was aware of at least some of the rather Byzantine politics going on among the various interested parties, through my involvement with the .Net series of books. I was also aware of the reputation that both Mono and Xamarin had for being “a bit crashy.”
The introduction of the lightweight, portable Visual Studio Code, and the gradual integration of Xamarin tools into Visual Studio 2015, were positive signs in my view. Once Microsoft announced it would acquire Xamarin (in February 2016) it became clear to me that the Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio IDEs were likely to merge on the Mac to create a single development environment, but I wasn’t sure exactly what form it would take or how many of the features from Visual Studio for Windows could or would be implemented on the Mac.
Inside Visual Studio for the Mac
Essentially, Visual Studio for the Mac is Xamarin Studio plus a Visual Studio look and feel, along with Roslyn-based C# IntelliSense, refactoring, analyzers, and code fixes; NuGet-based package management; a Visual Studio-compatible project format; the MSBuild engine; integrated unit testing; and support for F#.
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