Visual Studio for Mac

I don’t know if this means anything for anybody around here but just in case, i came across this a little bit ago:

So are they merging Xamarin into Visual Studio? I guess so, even though the page is gone missing on the MSDevNetwork …

They have also had Visual Studio Code editor out on Mac for a while.

On Wednesday, Microsoft is hosting its Connect() developer conference in New York City, but the company has accidentally let slip a couple of pieces of news a bit early. Posts were published to MSDN Magazine (though they’ve now been removed) earlier than intended.

The biggest news is that Visual Studio is coming to the Mac—or, at least, a piece of software named Visual Studio is coming to the Mac. Microsoft has always had a surprising willingness to give different products similar names, a move that generally provokes more confusion than it does enlightenment. The same seems true here.

Visual Studio for Mac isn’t, in fact, Visual Studio at all. Instead, it’s the latest iteration of Xamarin Studio, the cross-platform C# development environment that Microsoft inherited when it bought Xamarin, developers of cross-platform .NET-based mobile development tools, last year.

These are two very different products, and the real Windows Visual Studio is the more capable product. However, the two offerings are less different than they once were. Even without Microsoft’s ownership of the company, the Xamarin platform was set to align more closely with the .NET platform thanks to Microsoft’s open sourcing efforts: many components that Xamarin had to develop independently could be dropped in favor of the “real” .NET versions. In particular, the Roslyn C# compiler and MSBuild build tool and project files are shared between real Visual Studio and the new Visual Studio for Mac. The interface designers for building Android and iOS apps using the Xamarin platform are also shared. This means that if a project builds in one, it will build in the other. Thus, developers on different platforms can easily contribute to the same projects; teams can in principle be made of a mix of Windows and Mac developers.

For those wanting something a little lighter weight, Microsoft’s other weirdly branded product, Visual Studio Code (which, again, has no real shared heritage with “Visual Studio”), remains a cross-platform text editor and simple development environment.

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Thanks Jeff, C# is on my todo list.

«Randy

not mine…
i’ll stick with Python :smiley:

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are you having issues connecting to the extension gallery? i’m trying to get the Rhino extension. thanks.

I have it here, probably because I had it installed with an older version of Xamarin.

Not sure if this helps, but here is the GitHub link

As a SideNote, @dan , I cannot install it / find it , when trying to use RhinoCommon plugin with Visual Studio 2017 Beta on Windows. This was a week ago, so if it is working now excuse me. I will check this at home tonight.

Cheers, «Randy

i ended up installing Xamarin Studio 6.0.2, I guess they haven’t updated the plugin yet for the latest Xamarin release or Visual Studio.

I believe so, I installed Visual Studio 2017 here at work and no Rhino plugin.

:smile: I had tried that myself. Clearly, Visual Studio for Mac is in very early days. We’ll take a look at getting the Rhino/Grasshopper add-in working when we have time and as the product matures. For the time being, safer to stick with Xamarin Studio for Mac.

I was going back to an old project in Xamarin Studio for Mac and it was telling me to update …

After trying this a few times and it just not working, I always had to Force Quit. So I went to the website to download new one and it gives me VisualStudioForMac DMG …

So I tried again from the Xamarin update developer updates page and saw this …

I am mentioning this so that the Docs & Rhino plugin get transferred to Visual Studio.

Cheers, Randy

UPDATE: I see the Rhino Common Plugin is supported in VisualStudio for mac now, GREAT!

«Randy

Internally, we are updating to Visual Studio for Mac in the coming weeks. I have it on my TODO list to update the docs with new information.

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We have switched to Visual Studio for Mac for internal development and we recommend that third-party plugin developers do as well. I’ve updated the Installing Tools (Mac) guide.

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