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Desktops (Apple) Microsoft Programming

Microsoft is Bringing Visual Studio To Mac (techcrunch.com) 133

Posted by msmash from the new-Microsoft dept.
Microsoft will finally bring Visual Studio, a "true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for .NET and C#," to Mac later this month, the company has said. From a report on TechCrunch:The IDE is very similar to the one found on Windows. In fact, that is presumably the point. By making it easy for OS X users to switch back and forth between platforms, Microsoft is able to ensure coders can quickly become desktop agnostic or, barring that, give Windows a try again. From the release: "At its heart, Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio. If you enjoy the Visual Studio development experience, but need or want to use macOS, you should feel right at home. Its UX is inspired by Visual Studio, yet designed to look and feel like a native citizen of macOS. And like Visual Studio for Windows, it's complemented by Visual Studio Code for times when you don't need a full IDE, but want a lightweight yet rich standalone source editor.
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Microsoft is Bringing Visual Studio To Mac More

Microsoft is Bringing Visual Studio To Mac

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  • Xcode is superior, go away (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I cannot stand Visual Studio's project/solution hierarchy. Xcode allows for an additional tier; target/project/workspace. 8 files build in parallel, not projects. Build times in Xcode are so much faster for the same C++ library.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hsmith ( 818216 )
      XCode is just buggy as all get out though. It has progressively gotten less stable. The IDE is fantastic, but it has so many issues. Doing Swift 2.3 it is pointing out Swift 3.0 "errors." Functionality just doesn't work (downloading provisioning profiles via Settings). They haven't been maintaining it quality wise as it once was.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by OzPeter ( 195038 )

        They haven't been maintaining it quality wise as it once was.

        I haven't seriously used XCode for a while but I don't think ever got to the same level of quality as VS. My biggest pet peeve was that refactoring in XCode sucked big hairy donkey's balls in comparison to VS (even without thing slick resharper). And refactoring is a major part of coding.

    • Re:Xcode is superior, go away (Score:5, Funny)

      by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @12:06PM (#53282123) Homepage
      Brag about Xcode all you want. But can Xcode do this . . .

      Clippy: It looks like you're trying to get useful work done.
      Would you like me to help you install Windows 10?

      If you would like to have Windows 10 installed, then please do any of the following actions:
      1. Click Yes
      2. Click No
      3. Click Cancel
      4. Click the red button in the window's title bar
      5. Abruptly disconnect the computer's electrical power to have Windows 10 conveniently installed on the next reboot.

  • Fantastic (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hsmith ( 818216 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @09:48AM (#53280813)
    Been doing .NET forever and with .NET Core running on macOS now, this is welcome news. Visual Studio Code is nice, but it isn't the solution full Visual Studio is. With full blown Visual Studio, .NET Core, Docker, I won't even need to run VMs anymore on my macbook to get work done.

  • Can you cross-compile with it? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @09:50AM (#53280835)

    I'd be happy if software companies who made the mistake of using platform-specific APIs and languages could cross-compile. Are you listening, Intuit?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bondsbw ( 888959 )

      That's the whole point of Xamarin.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

        The whole point of Xamarin is to hold out the prospect of cross-platform API's to get people not using Microsoft API's to switch to a Microsoft-specific API, that yes - for now - is kind of platform agnostic. Maybe that's okay-ish, but it'd have been a better solution had Microsoft not bought it. And it's not a desktop solution at all - it provides some decent mobile GUI stuff, but nothing to get WIN32 desktop developers to switch.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Xamarin started as C# for iOS and Android. None of those have anything in common, nor Microsoft APIs. Now you have xamarin forms, but they recommend it only if you are doing really generic UI. Please step up the FUD, you're coming low for Slashdot's level.

  • Almost bought a Windows laptop... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I've been debating the past few weeks on whether or not to buy a new Windows laptop just so I could run Visual Studio....this solves that problem, thanks Microsoft!

    • >> whether or not to buy a new Windows laptop just so I could run Visual Studio

      Yes, you still should. (And get one with a nice SSD, but you probably already knew that.) Unless MS is also moving over support for SQL Server Express, debuggers, the full AD infrastructure, etc. they still have those of us who write for large/corporate environments by the short and curlies.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        SQL Server can run in docker containers now, on linux even.

      • SQL Server Express, debuggers, the full AD infrastructure, etc

        Better choice to avoid using all those altogether.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by PCM2 ( 4486 )

          Better choice to avoid using all those altogether.

          Active Directory is a way of life for many, many organizations. If that includes yours, good luck "avoiding it."

  • Disclaimer certainty (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DaveM753 ( 844913 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @09:56AM (#53280885)

    Probable disclaimer from Microsoft:

    Users of Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac OSX may find certain features of Visual Studio do not function as expected under the Mac OSX platform. For those users, we recommend using Visual Studio on a Microsoft Windows-based platform, to improve reliability.

    Translation:

    You didn't really expect us to write quality software for a competing OS that didn't eventually drive you over to Windows, did you? Silly user...

    • Re:Disclaimer certainty (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dontbemad ( 2683011 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @10:23AM (#53281051)
      Sounds like Microsoft would be taking a play right out of Apple's book.

      • Oh, Microsoft has been doing that far longer than Apple.

        See: the old Mac version of Excel where they just deleted VBA scripting, and figured nobody would notice. Then they brought it back all of a sudden in the next version and proclaimed it to be a huge feature.

        I'm still waiting for an Outlook on OS X that isn't just a bad OWA front end. And they are capable of making a real Outlook on the Mac too - because they had one 15 years ago on Mac OS 9, which was killed by the Mac Apps team in a bad case of Not

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by slapout ( 93640 )

      I don't think Microsoft cares as much about Windows. I think they want you to buy their cloud services.

    • What a poor translation. Certain features may not work as expected: OSX is a completely different architecture and may things, like WCF and WPF may not function as well as they do on Windows. ADO may not be fully fleshed out. Microsoft makes fantastic developer tools - I don't think any serious developer would dispute that. If they target Visual Studio for OSX or Linux or DrDOS, you can bet your bottom dollar that Microsoft will work hard to make a REALLY GOOD IDE. I love the .NET Framework. I love Mono. I'

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stooo ( 2202012 )

      >> Users of Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac OSX may find certain features of Visual Studio do not function as expected

      Yeah, as usual.
      Users of Microsoft Visual Studio for Windows also find certain features of Visual Studio do not function as expected.

    • This. I work in an enterprise that uses a lot of Microsoft products, but users insist on buying Macs. Then kvetch because things never work the way they're supposed to. I wish MS would just abandon the Mac, it would save everyone a lot of disappointment and aggravation.

      • I wish MS would just abandon the Mac, it would save everyone a lot of disappointment and aggravation.

        You don't think that they tried? I remember some past attempts Microsoft had made in killing off their Mac products and it nearly ended them. One of the big selling points in many Microsoft products is that they work just as well (or rather just as poorly) on Windows and Mac. If they killed their Mac products do you believe all the Mac users would just switch to running Windows? This would be especially true now that most every Office file format has been reverse engineered well enough that people make

      • Some years ago, I had a friend who worked for Microsoft on Mac software. He said that, after every time top management publicly blasted the Mac, they'd send someone over to his area to say "Don't worry, guys, that's just PR. You make lots of money for us, and we like money."

    • You didn't really expect us to write quality software for a competing OS that didn't eventually drive you over to Windows, did you? Silly user...

      I think it's probably more that anything which isn't .NET or in any way cross platform already isn't coming along for the ride. Don't expect to compile anything that needs Win32 or COM or DirectX (which is also COM), etc. You would assume the decently savvy developer would already know or guess this but you can't be too sure, plus there's bound to be some executi

  • Qt (Score:4, Interesting)

    by saider ( 177166 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @10:07AM (#53280959)

    I've been using Qt for this purpose for years.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hublan ( 197388 )

      I've been using Qt for this purpose for years.

      If only the LLDB bridge in QtCreator wouldn't freeze every time you so much as sneezed, then I'd be very happy.

      It's like it's an unattainable goal to make a decent visual debugger that is not Visual Studio.

    • Question......how is QT backwards compatibility? I've been hearing complaints that things keep breaking.

  • What's Good About Visual Studio? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I usual Visual Studio from version 6 to 2010 for MFC development and found it got worse and worse with each new version. The interface turned into a train wreck and reduced your productivity and made it unpleasant to work with. The install size became absurd with it installing a lot of crap you didn't want (even if you unchecked all components the install size was still 8GB). Despite the insane bloat it lacked basic functionality (why wasn't something like Visual Leak Detector included as standard?). Fu

    • Since this is basically rebranded Xamarin Studio, it doesn't really have much to do with VS. Or C++, for that matter.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Yunzil ( 181064 )

      Microsoft's development strategy appears to be "continue development until the product is unusable".

      So, like every other software application in the world then?

  • Microsoft pulled the announcement (Score:5, Interesting)

    by trawg ( 308495 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @10:32AM (#53281119) Homepage

    The original announcement [microsoft.com] that was the source of the article in the OP has since been pulled; I've seen mention that it was just posted too early. Presumably it will be back at the regularly scheduled time or perhaps earlier when they realise that the genie is out of the bottle.

  • How can it? VS is 32 bit (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If it can do 64 bit IDE then why not PCs?

    • Who said VS can't be built by MS to be 64 bit on Windows? For the time being they have simply made the choice not to.

      It will be interesting to see how much code charging there is between Windows and Mac versions.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by OhPlz ( 168413 )

        MS said they're not going to, I posted the announcement here some months back. Devs are still whining about it in the initial request on one of their feedback sites.

  • I haven't used Visual studio for any real work since 2008, but as I recall their debugger was fantastic for debugging C++. The other aspects of it were kinda "meh", but the debugger was freaking amazing. (And I'm a Mac/Linux guy who uses either Xcode or Makefiles most of the time.)

    • Re:The debugger was very good. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ripvlan ( 2609033 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @12:46PM (#53282505)

      Yes it is fantastic. I grew up on dbx and xdbx (at least AIX version added wonderful stuff). WinDbg is a frustrating mess of amazing-power coupled to arcane commands. VS lays over this what xdbx did for dbx.

      Best VS debugger feature was IntelliTrace (C# / .NET "only" feature). Still need to have the Enterprise or Ultimate license - but if you have it - wow. One can walk code backwards from a break-point looking to answer the inevitable question "how did execution get to this line?"

      Although none of the MS tools provides "where" like a dbx/core dump provides (although WinDbg can come close).

      For all of the hate that some spew at MS - the one thing they have always been good at is ease of access for complex technology. SQL Server - easy to use. VS - easy to code. Windows 8 - never mind.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xest ( 935314 )

      Visual Studio is the best of breed IDE slowly being made worse in an attempt to capture "Web 2.0" marketshare from PHP, node.js developers and the like whilst dragging the whole IDE down to their level and failing their core market where all the enterprise licensing (i.e. the bulk of their income) comes from - the business world that uses languages like C, C# and C++.

      If you've not used it since 2008, you've not really missed much, it peaked at 2010 and has become much worse since as features have been remov

  • Sorry, I've seen Microsoft's flaky support of Skype for Business, various iterations of Office, and others on Mac, and I just can't trust them with my dev environment. I'll still keep my .NET dev stuff on a stable of Windows 10 laptops and my everything else on the Mac.

  • a true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool

    There can be only one! [youtube.com]

  • to bad there no real workstations on the mac.

    the mac pro is 3 years old and was cut down from dual cpu to 1 cpu. If you want real power HP, DELL, Supermicro, and others have it for you.

    • When Apple switched from offering 2 CPUs to only 1 the number of cores available as BTO options did not change, that remained as up to 12 cores. What you are arguing over sounds like a no true Scotsman fallacy.

      If you are arguing that anything with less than 16 cores is a "toy" then that is a different argument. I fail to see the difference between having 2 CPUs with 6 cores each and having a single CPU with 12 cores. I'm sure that there are differences in many ways, just none that matter to most buyers.

      • Cutting from 2 to 1 also cut the number of PCI-E channels and ram channels.

        With apple they have hit the pci-e wall so unless they cut down the pci-e going to the video cards or add an 2th cpu they can't do TB 3.0 or 2 storage cards.

        • In other words Apple created a computer that could be called balanced, optimal, or efficient. The Mac Pro does not have TB3, 2 storage cards, and so on. If they add such things in a future design, and fail to also add a 2nd CPU then you may have a point.

  • My all-time favorite IDE was CodeWarrior on classic Mac (the Windows version was the best on that platform at the time.) I tried Visual Studio 6 and wasn't impressed.

    Then I had to use VS every day and got used to it. Most of its problems were/are horrific UI design (hidden/obfuscated settings!) and twitchiness (hangs; recreating projects from scratch when they refuse to build.) Overall usability is now quite good, and automation (intellisense, etc) is first rate.

    I haven't tried XCode recently, last time it

  • No point in getting all excited about it.

  • Different product (Score:3)

    by kosmosik ( 654958 ) <kos AT kosmosik DOT net> on Monday November 14, 2016 @02:09PM (#53283347) Homepage

    According to Ars Technica it is different product

    http://arstechnica.com/informa... [arstechnica.com]

    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.

  • I'm already using Qt and am happy to stay away from the painful VS.
    - under Windows, Qt uses gcc/MinGW (or VS compiler if you wish)
    - under Mac OS X, Qt uses XCode compiler
    - under Linux, Qt uses native and easily installed gcc

    At the time of the version 3, I also had the opportunity to work with the embedded version (user interface in trains, running on PPC computers).

    So there is Qt, and there are many other solutions described in the other comments. M$, what are you doing here, then ?

    By the way, since Skype i

  • It will no doubt come with telemetry fully enabled by default, perhaps with direct parallel feeds to FBI, NSA, and the CIA.

  • I would gladly switch to Visual Studio on Mac since Xcode feels like a straight jacket. I want file-based tabs, not workspace-tabs and Visual Studio gives me proper tabs. If I could develop macOS & iOS apps using Visual Studio, then I'll never need Xcode again :-)

  • Go ahead, install this stuff on your mac, what could happen?

    Next thing you know, a big skull and crossbones shows up on your screen telling you to call - rasomware fix.
    Since you're on a mac, you have just 1 day to pay up with bitcoin.

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