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Visual Studio for Mac

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Lee_Stott
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Mar 21, 2019
First published on MSDN on Aug 02, 2017

Visual Studio for Mac brings the IDE loved by millions to the Mac. It offers developers an integrated environment to build, debug, test, and deploy apps, games, and services for mobile, web, and cloud. Teams across PC and Mac can share code seamlessly by relying on the same solutions and projects.

With access to the same compiler, code completion and refactoring experience that you know and love from Visual Studio on Windows, Visual Studio for Mac provides a world-class coding experience. Solutions and projects can be worked on from both PC and Mac, enabling developer flexibility and seamless collaboration across teams.

Visual Studio for Mac

This also offers benefits to developers who are working between PC and Mac, by not having to sacrifice any loss in productivity.

If you are familiar with apps on Mac, Visual Studio for Mac will feel right at home, as it is designed natively for the Mac user. Developer workflow alignment with native Mac IDEs such as Xcode enable rapid adoption without a steep learning curve

Visual Studio for Mac brings industry leading capabilities to you, letting you maximize your potential when developing applications and games targeting mobile and other devices, cloud, and the web. It enables you to develop beautiful mobile apps across Android and iOS, all in C# or F#, while delivering native performance and user experiences.

.NET Support

With the added .NET Core and ASP.NET Core workloads, your code now reaches even further to other operating systems and the web. ASP.NET Core also enables you to develop powerful backend services for your apps, and Visual Studio for Mac enables you to publish these to Azure, directly from the IDE.

Cross Platform

•Build apps for macOS, iOS, and Android devices with the power and productivity of Visual Studio and .NET. Share app logic and code across device platforms.

•Visual Studio for Mac provides the same powerful web editor tools you know and love from Visual Studio on Windows.

•With full support for ASP.NET Core, HTML5, and CSS3, you can build highly interactive JavaScript-based apps for consumers, LOB, and enterprise.

Performance and Profiling

•Develop in C# or F# and get native performance and fully customized, native user experiences.

•Optimize your app’s performance with rich profiling data, and inspect them at runtime to find bugs faster with Visual Studio Enterprise for Mac features.

Cloud Services

•Microsoft Azure App Service is a cloud platform for building powerful web and mobile apps and allows you to connect to data anywhere, in the cloud or on premises.

•With built-in support for publication of your web apps to Azure, scaling through the cloud couldn’t be easier.

•With Visual Studio for Mac and .NET Core you get the tools you need to create versatile web services running on Azure App Service and deploy them to the cloud, right from within the IDE.

Game Development with Unity3d

If you have a C# skillset and want to build games, chances are good that you will come across Unity. Unity is a widely popular toolset from Unity Technologies for creating 2D and 3D games for desktops, mobile devices, and even consoles. Visual Studio for Mac includes Tools for Unity, enabling a full script editing and debugging experience.

•With the Visual Studio for Mac Tools for Unity, you get a best-in-class script editor for your Unity games. This includes full code completion and syntax highlighting and a solution explorer that‘s specific to Unity games and mimics the layout you would see in Unity.

•With one-click debugging, you can use Visual Studio for Mac’s great debugging capabilities to optimize your games.

Versions

Visual Studio for Mac is available in the same three editions as on Windows. A generous Community edition is available for free, for development teams under 5, in companies with <250 PCs or <$1 million annual revenue.

The Community edition can also be used for open-source projects and education purposes, all while being able to create free and paid apps and seamlessly integrate with the cloud.

Included in the Visual Studio Professional and Enterprise subscriptions, come the Professional and Enterprise editions, which are fully licensed for enterprise use. The collaboration between developers on PC and Mac really shines here, all while having access to the same great benefits in the subscription.

Visual Studio for Mac is available today at https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/ . It brings you a world-class IDE to build apps, games, and services for mobile, web, and cloud. Paired with Visual Studio (on Windows), it enhances developer productivity across platforms, all while feeling right at home on the Mac and being easy to adopt.

Resources

Additionally, we also have a number of hands-on labs available on GitHub , which should help you and your students get started using the various workloads available in Visual Studio for Mac.

Download Visual Studio for Mac for your institution at https://imagine.microsoft.com/en-us/catalog

Updated Mar 21, 2019
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