Nov 12, 2015 - Learn how to turn a Mac into the ultimate Visual Studio development machine for NET developers.
Microsoft has a bunch of important improvements slated for its Visual Studio 2019 for Mac whenever it is released, and the company has laid out a detailed roadmap to advise users of what is to come. Visual Studio 2017 for Mac was released in 2017 and has since received a wide range of new features, including support for NET Core 2; richer language services for editing JavaScript, TypeScript and Razor pages; Azure Functions; and the ability to deploy and debug.NET Core apps inside Docker containers. But that was just the, wrote Unni Ravindranathan, principal program manager and lead of the Visual Studio for Mac program management team, in a recent post on The Visual Studio Blog. Further reading. 'Our aspiration with Visual Studio for Mac is to bring the Visual Studio experiences that developers have come to know and love on Windows to the MacOS and to provide an excellent IDE experience for all.NET cross-platform developers,' he wrote.
When Visual Studio 2017 for Mac was released, it was an IDE primarily focused on mobile application development using Xamarin, wrote Ravindranathan. Now that version has been refined and expanded to also include support for all major.NET cross-platform workloads including Xamarin, Unity and.NET Core. There have been other improvements as well, but the company is now ready to start talking about the next version, Visual Studio 2019 for Mac, even as it continues to plan updates for the 2017 version through early 2019, he wrote. The plans for Visual Studio 2019 for Mac are laid out in a that describes many of the feedback themes that were raised by users who asked for certain features, improvements and capabilities in an upcoming version. 'Improving the typing performance and reliability is our single biggest focus area for Visual Studio 2019 for Mac,' wrote Ravindranathan. 'We plan to replace most of the internals of the Visual Studio for Mac editor with those from Visual Studio. Combined with the work to improve our integration of various language services, our aspiration is to bring similar levels of editor productivity from Visual Studio to Visual Studio for Mac.'
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125467608/927634189.png)
At the same time, Microsoft will work to address a from users to add Right-To-Left (RTL) support to the application's built-in editor to enable right-to-left languages to display text correctly on a screen, he wrote. Also highly requested by Mac users has been support for Team Foundation Server, with both Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) and Git as the source control mechanisms, he wrote.
'While we currently have an extension available for Visual Studio 2017 for Mac that adds support for TFVC, we will integrate it into the core of the source control experience in Visual Studio 2019 for Mac.' For users seeking increased productivity, the C# editor in Visual Studio for Mac will be built on top of the same Roslyn back end used by Visual Studio on Windows, which will bring many performance improvements, he wrote.
'In the Visual Studio 2019 for Mac release, we'll also dramatically reduce the time it takes you to connect to your source code and begin working with it in the product, by introducing a streamlined 'open from version control' dialog with a brand-new Git-focused workflow.' Among the updates still to come for the existing Visual Studio 2017 for Mac application are support for.NET Core 2.2 and the ability to publish ASP.NET Core projects to a folder. Support for Azure Functions 2.0 will also be added, as well as an update to the New Functions Project dialog to support updating to the latest version of Azure Functions tooling and templates. In Visual Studio 2019 for Mac, support for.NET Core 3.0 will be added when it becomes available in 2019, as well as additional ASP.NET Core templates and template options and improved Azure publishing options. Also to come are improvements to the application's language services supporting ASP.NET Core development including Razor, JavaScript and TypeScript.
Xamarin support updates will include continuing improvements for Android build performance and improvements in the reliability of deploying iOS and Android apps, including making it easier to acquire Android emulators from within the Visual Studio for Mac IDE. Updates will also come to the Xamarin.Forms Previewer and the Xamarin.Android Designer as well as the XAML language service for Xamarin Forms, wrote Ravindranathan. 'By supporting installation of both versions of the product side-by-side, we'll make it easy for you to try out the Visual Studio 2019 for Mac preview releases while we are still also working on the stable Visual Studio 2017 for Mac releases in parallel,' he wrote. A preview version is not yet ready but will be announced in the future.
Microsoft is continuing to accept feedback from users on the existing product through the website.
April 2nd, 2019 Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Visual Studio 2019 for Mac – the next major version of our.NET IDE on the Mac. This release is now available as an for existing Visual Studio for Mac users, and new users can it today as well. You also can learn more about the new capabilities in this version by reading our.
Visual Studio 2019 for Mac focuses on improving the core of the IDE, setting a foundation for us to bring new capabilities to you more rapidly with future updates. In this blog post, we want to highlight some of the new capabilities included with this release which have been shaped greatly by your feedback. In addition to general improvements to the IDE, we have also introduced several improvements for developers building mobile apps using Xamarin, games using Unity, and web applications and services using.NET Core.
So, let’s get started! A new C# editor The code editor in Visual studio for Mac has been completely replaced with a new editor built on a shared core with Visual Studio on Windows, and with native macOS UI. Not only does this provide an enhanced experience with smooth editing and navigation, but the new editor also has all the powerful IntelliSense/code-completion and quick fix suggestions you expect from a Visual Studio editor. Furthermore, we have added support for bi-directional text, multi-caret, word wrapping and much more that you can read about in greater detail.
We are busy adding a last few finishing touches to the editor and hence the preview editor is only available for use when you opt-in. To enable the new editor, navigate to the Visual Studio Preferences menu, Text Editor General section and check the Open C# files in the New Editor checkbox.
Stay tuned as we work towards enabling it for C# and XAML, with other languages coming shortly thereafter. Start window With Visual Studio 2019 for Mac, we’ve introduced a brand-new way of interacting with your projects and getting you where you need to go in the IDE. The Start Window allows you to quickly create new projects or conveniently search and navigate to a project you might have previously opened in the IDE. Running multiple instances Visual Studio 2019 for Mac allows you to easily launch multiple instances of the IDE from the macOS dock, enabling you to work on multiple solutions simultaneously, one per instance. Xamarin tools Developers run though the “build, deploy, debug” cycle countless times in any given day.
As we continue working to shorten the inner development loop, we’ve made big gains in trimming down the time you spend building and deploying for Android, so you can focus on creating amazing mobile apps. Say goodbye to all those build-time coffee breaks! With the help of your feedback, we found that optimizing incremental builds and deployments is one great way to achieve a high-impact improvement.
Testing with the SmartHotel360 app showed an almost 30% decrease in incremental build times, while deployment times are over twice as fast: Step Visual Studio 2017 Visual Studio 2019 Delta First build 01:04.20 00:50.13 -21.95% Incremental Build (XAML Change) 00:10.62 00:07.47 -29.66% Deploy (XAML Change) 00:09.03 00:04.44 -50.83% A full report of build performance profiling, as well as methodology, can be viewed on the Tools for Unity We have ported the Unity debugger from Visual Studio on Windows to the Mac. Beyond making it possible for us to apply fixes across both products at the same time, this new debugger provides better compatibility with older versions of Unity and a better experience when debugging unsafe C# code. ASP.NET Core and.NET Core tools We have made many improvements to our.NET Core and web tools including better support for JavaScript colorization within Razor (.cshtml) files, auto-updating of Azure functions, the ability to easily set up multiple startup projects for debugging and, finally, updated Docker tools. Performance, reliability and accessibility improvements We have made a significant number of performance and reliability improvements in this release across the board. In particular, the C# code editor, Git support, Xamarin, and.NET Core debugging should all be significantly faster and more reliable with this release. This release also includes more than 200 accessibility related fixes that move us closer to our goal to be completely accessible on the Mac.
What’s next for Visual Studio 2019 for Mac As we had previously called out in our, our near-term priority is to enable the new editor for C#, followed by other file extensions. Beyond that, we are bringing over the Xamarin Forms XAML language service from Visual Studio on Windows to the Mac, adding support for multi-targeting, solution level package management and file-nesting support for ASP.NET Core. Stay tuned for future Visual Studio 2019 for Mac updates! We strive to be 100% driven by your feedback and we love to hear from you, so please do share your. Thank you for helping us shape Visual Studio for Mac. We look forward to you downloading and using this new release.
Hi Barry, it is true that we do not have an open marketplace for Visual Studio for Mac today. We do have an extension gallery where we host some select extesions build by the team, but that is not something broadly available. We do want to eventually have a marketplace, where the community can easily build and share extensions across the two PC and Mac versions, but this is not on our near-term roadmap. Please free to create a suggestion on our Developer Community portal so others can also vote on this request.