Visual Studio 2019 For Mac - 2 years back, when I examined Visual Studio 2019, I came away assuming that Microsoft's IDE had actually ended up being the most complicated product ever, and Microsoft would certainly need to streamline it in the future. I was wrong in one respect: Although Microsoft tossed out a couple of functions for Visual Studio 2019, it included a good deal more. Download Visual Studio Community, Professional, and Enterprise. Try Visual Studio IDE, Code or Mac for free today. Python Tools for Visual Studio is a completely free extension, developed and supported by Microsoft with contributions from the community. Visit our Github page to see or participate in PTVS development.
Microsoft has made Visual Studio 2019 generally available for download.
Visual Studio 2019 improves on Visual Studio 2017 in a few areas. It helps you get into your code more quickly by making it simpler to clone a Git repo or to open an existing project or folder. It also introduces improvements to the template selection screen to make it easier to start a new project.
Visual Studio 2019 also comes with a revamped search experience. The search bar on the IDE is now accessible with a quick Ctrl+Q shortcut, and once you access the search bar you will now get search results for shortcuts, commands, settings, and more. The search bar also now works around your silly spelling mistakes, so you will now get the right search results even if there’s a typo on your query.
The new platform also improves code navigation and adds many refactorings, and includes a document health indicator and one-click code clean-up to apply multiple refactoring rules.
There are also improvements to the debugging experience, including data breakpoints for .NET Core apps that help you break only on value changes you’re looking for. It also includes get AI-assisted code completion with Visual Studio IntelliCode.
The debugging experience of the IDE is being improved with faster stepping performance, and new searching abilities for the Autos, Locals, and Watch debug windows.
These capabilities work with both your existing project and new projects – from cross-platform C++ applications, to .NET mobile apps for Android and iOS written using Xamarin, to cloud-native applications using Azure services.
Microsoft is also releasing today Visual Studio 2019 for Mac and Visual Studio Live Share.
Visual Studio 2019 for Mac focuses mostly on the same things as Visual Studio 2019 for Windows. It introduces a new start experience that helps you get started quicker, and work with your existing/new projects much faster than before.
Visual Studio 2019 for Mac also brings a new C# editor that brings the best of Visual Studio to the Mac. Microsoft says the new editor has been built on the same shared core with Visual Studio on Windows, so the coding experience will be identical, but it will continue to have an interface that matches the native macOS design. Microsoft says the new C# editor allows for smoother editing and navigation, as well as powerful code-completion with IntelliSense, smarter suggestions, support for bi-directional text, multi-caret editing, word wrapping, and more.
The new C# editor is launching as a preview and you will need to enable it manually from the IDE’s settings. Microsoft says it’s working to bring it to more languages as well, starting with XAML.
The latest version of Visual Studio for Mac also allows for multiple instances, which has been one of the much-requested features, according to Microsoft.
Visual Studio 2019 also brings over the Unity debugger from Visual Studio on Windows to the Mac, offering a better debugging experience for developers while allowing Microsoft to apply fixes across both Visual Studio on Windows and Visual Studio on Mac at the same time.
Microsoft says Visual Studio 2019 for Mac packs a whole bunch of performance improvements, too — with faster performances across the new C# code editor, Git support, Xamarin, and .NET Core debugging.
Microsoft has also partnered with Pluralsight and LinkedIn Learning to bring new training content. Pluralsight has a new, free, Visual Studio 2019 course (available until April 22, 2019). On LinkedIn Learning you’ll find a new course (free until May 2nd) covering the highlights in Visual Studio 2019.
Hands On Microsoft this week opened the gates on Visual Studio for Mac 2019 8.3, a flexible development environment for .NET, and The Reg can give you the lowdown on some of the new features.
But first, let's see how the Microsofties got here. Redmond has three coding tools under the Visual Studio brand, all of which have different ancestries.
Visual Studio on Windows supports development not only in .NET languages but also C++, Python, JavaScript and Node.js, and cross-platform mobile development using Xamarin, Apache Cordova or C++. Depending on which edition you have, you also get SQL Server database tools, test and coverage frameworks, Microsoft Office and SharePoint development, R for data science work, built-in Docker tools and more.
Xamarin is a cross-platform .NET framework designed mainly for iOS and Android, but also with support for macOS applications. A confusing thing is that Xamarin does not use .NET Core, though it does support the .NET Standard 2.1 specification in its latest version. See here for guidance.
Xamarin evolved from the open-source Mono framework, an implementation of .NET for Windows and Linux. Mono had its own IDE, called MonoDevelop, which unlike Visual Studio was originally written entirely in C#. Xamarin adapted MonoDevelop to become Xamarin Studio. When Microsoft acquired Xamarin in 2016, Xamarin Studio became a Mac-only IDE and was renamed Visual Studio for Mac. You can still get MonoDevelop for Mac, Windows and Linux, though the Mac download is now Visual Studio for Mac, and on Windows you have to build it from source.
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a cross-platform editor built with the Electron framework, using Node.js and the Chromium browser engine Blink. VS Code was first previewed in 2015 and has been a remarkable success, now ranking as the top development environment on the popular coding Q&A site StackOverflow by a huge margin. Although lightweight in comparison to Visual Studio, VS Code straddles the boundary between an editor and an IDE, with debugging support and a rich range of extensions.
Following the acquisition, Microsoft has been working on sharing some of its Visual Studio for Windows technology with the Mac version. This goes alongside the development of the cross-platform .NET Core, which has allowed code sharing between Mono and .NET Core, though Mono has not been completely replaced. It is still the case that Visual Studio for the Mac is a very different thing from Visual Studio for Windows.
What can Visual Studio for Mac do?
VS Mac is primarily for Xamarin development. The majority of Xamarin developers code applications for iOS and Android, and there are two different approaches to this.
Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android let you write non-visual code in C# while using native tools to build the UI, Xcode for iOS or a built-in Android designer for Android.
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Xamarin Forms is a cross-platform GUI framework. You design the user interface with XAML and build for your chosen target platforms.
You can also go beyond iOS and Android. Xamarin.Mac is for Cocoa applications and uses a similar model to Xamarin.iOS. Xamarin Forms can also target Windows UWP (Universal Windows Platform) and, in preview, macOS.
There is also steadily improving support for games development with Unity.
A glance at the Xamarin forums gives a crude guide to usage. Xamarin Forms has more than double the activity of any other section (over 51,000 threads). Xamarin.Android 34,000, Xamarin.iOS 21,000, and relatively low activity elsewhere – 343 threads for Xamarin.Mac, for example.
Xamarin Forms Mac support seems to be moribund; it was announced in 2017 but the platform status here was last updated in May 2018 and remains incomplete.
Visual Studio for the Mac also supports ASP.NET Core development using Razor, Angular or React.js, and serverless with Azure Functions.
Under the Vulture's Claw
A cross-platform Xamarin Forms app running on iOS and Android
We installed VS Mac on a 2018 Mac Mini. The installer pulls down the Android SDK for you, but you have to install Xcode separately. All straightforward, but there is a puzzle about .NET Core. Version 3.0 is installed automatically, and you can create ASP.NET Core apps, but when you go to create a mobile app, the option to create an ASP.NET Core API back end is disabled because it 'requires an ASP.NET Core installation'.
The look and feel of the IDE is different from Visual Studio on Windows, as you would expect from the product history. It feels more basic and less refined, and has only a fraction of the features of its similarly named cousin.
There is no visual designer for Xamarin Forms, but there is a visual preview. Unfortunately, this did not work for iOS on our very simple demo app, showing instead a MonoTouch exception message. But the app itself worked fine on both Android and iOS. The IDE did crash once or twice but with no loss of work.
Another experiment was to create a Xamarin.Mac application and edit the generated storyboard, which defines the user interface using Xcode. This worked perfectly.
What's new?
VS Mac 8.3 supports .NET Core 3 and C# 8.0, and Xamarin now supports Android 10, Xcode 11 and iOS 13.
One of the big new features, though in preview, is XAML hot reload in Xamarin Forms. This lets you amend the XAML file defining your UI, save it, and see the changes instantly in the app running on an emulator or device.
The Visual Studio Mac native editor shares code with Visual Studio on Windows
Download Visual Studio Code 2019 For Mac
The C# editor in VS Mac was rewritten by the Visual Studio team after the Microsoft acquisition. It now has what Microsoft calls a 'fully native UI', raising the interesting question of how much of the old MonoDevelop code, which used cross-platform Gtk#, remains in VS Mac. The new native editor was fully released in July, but VS Mac 8.3 now supports web editing (JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS and more). This lets Microsoft share more features between Visual Studio on Windows and VS Mac, including improved IntelliSense. You also get proper bidirectional text support and a natty feature called multi-caret editing that lets you overtype multiple regions of selected text simultaneously.
There is a new dialog for the NuGet package manager, but care is needed because not all NuGet packages will work on the Mac.
These are highlights; the full list of what's new is here.
Observations
Microsoft has two successful Visual Studio development tools, and then there is VS Mac, which is important only for Mac-based Xamarin developers. Xamarin.Mac and Xamarin Forms targeting macOS are both interesting for .NET developers wondering how to get their Windows apps onto a Mac, but both are neglected relative to iOS and Android. If you want to develop for ASP.NET Core you would be better off with Visual Studio on Windows, and probably better off with VS Code with its much larger community and rich extension support. Strategically, it might make sense for Microsoft to invest in making VS Code more useful for Xamarin developers. All that said, VS Mac is substantially improved and the price is right: even the free Community edition is a capable tool. ®