- Visual Studio for Mac enables you to write code accurately and efficiently without losing the current file context. You can easily zoom into details such as call structure, related functions, check-ins, and test status.
- Visual Studio for Mac evolves Xamarin's mobile-centric IDE, Xamarin Studio, into a mobile-first, cloud-first development environment on the Mac. This developer-focused tool allows you to use the power of.NET to create applications for all platforms required by your users.
Since it was released a little more than a year ago, Visual Studio 2017 for Mac has grown from being an IDE primarily focused on mobile application development using Xamarin to one that includes support for all major .NET cross-platform workloads including Xamarin, Unity, and .NET Core. 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.
Over the past year, we added several new capabilities to Visual Studio for Mac including .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. At the same time, we have continued to improve Xamarin mobile development inside Visual Studio for Mac by adding same-day support for the latest iOS and Android SDKs, improving the visual designers and streamlining the emulator and SDK acquisition experiences. And we have updated the Unity game development experience to reduce launch times of Visual Studio for Mac when working together with the Unity IDE. Finally, we have been investing heavily in fundamentals such as customer feedback via the Report-a-Problem tool, accessibility improvements, and more regular updates of components that we share with the broader .NET ecosystem such as the .NET compiler service (“Roslyn”), and the .NET Core SDKs. We believe that these changes will allow us to significantly accelerate delivery of new experiences in the near future.
With support for ASP.NET Core in Visual Studio for Mac, you are empowered to create beautiful, modern web applications. Craft the front-end with the same web editor experience you know and love from Visual Studio and Windows and publish to the cloud directly from the IDE.
While we will continue to make improvements to Visual Studio 2017 for Mac into early next year, we also want to start talking about what’s next: Visual Studio 2019 for Mac. Today, we are publishing a roadmap for Visual Studio for Mac, and in this blog post, I wanted to write about some of the major themes of feedback we are hearing and our plans to address them as described in our roadmap.
Improving the performance and reliability of the code editor
Improving the typing performance and reliability is our single biggest focus area for Visual Studio 2019 for Mac. 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. Finally, as a result of this work, we will also be able to address a top request from users to add Right-To-Left (RTL) support to our editor.
Supporting Team Foundation Version Control
Including support for Team Foundation Server, with both Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) and Git as the source control mechanisms, has been one of the top requested experiences on the Mac. 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.
Increased productivity when working with your projects
The C# editor in Visual Studio for Mac will be built on top of the same Roslyn backend used by Visual Studio on Windows and will see continuous improvements. In Visual Studio 2017 for Mac (version 7.7), we will enable the Roslyn-powered brace completion and indentation engine which helps improve your efficiency and productivity while writing C# code. We’re also making our quick fixes and code action more discoverable by introducing a light-bulb experience. With the light bulb, you’ll see recommendations highlighted inline in the editor as you code, with quick keyboard actions to preview and apply the recommendations. 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.
.NET Core and ASP.NET Core support
In future updates to Visual Studio 2017 for Mac, we will add support for .NET Core 2.2. We will add the ability to publish ASP.NET Core projects to a folder. We will also add support for Azure Functions 2.0, as well as update the New Functions Project dialog to support updating to the latest version of Azure Functions tooling and templates. In Visual Studio 2019 for Mac, we will add support for .NET Core 3.0 when it becomes available in 2019. We will add more ASP.NET Core templates and template options to Visual Studio for Mac and improve the Azure publishing options. Finally, building upon the code editor changes described above, we will improve all our language services supporting ASP.NET Core development including Razor, JavaScript and TypeScript.
Xamarin support
In addition to continuing to make improvements to the Xamarin platform itself, we will focus on improving Android build performance and improving the reliability of deploying iOS and Android apps. We will make it easy to acquire the Android emulators from within the Visual Studio for Mac IDE. Finally, we aim to make further improvements in the Xamarin.Forms Previewer and the Xamarin.Android Designer as well as the XAML language service for Xamarin Forms.
Unity support
We continue to invest in improving the experience of game developers using Unity to write and debug cross platform games as well as 2D and 3D content using Visual Studio for Mac. Unity now supports a .NET 4.7 and .NET Standard 2.0 profile, and we’re making sure that Visual Studio for Mac works out of the box to support those scenarios. Unity 2018.3 ships with Roslyn, the same C# compiler that is used with Visual Studio for Mac, and we’re enabling this for your IDE. In addition to this, we’ll be bringing our fine-tuned Unity debugger from the Visual Studio Tools for Unity to Visual Studio for Mac for a more reliable and faster Unity debugging experience.
Help us shape Visual Studio 2019 for Mac!
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.
Download Visual Studio Ide For Mac
We don’t have preview bits to share with you just yet, but we wanted to share our plans early so you can help us shape the product with your feedback that you can share through our Developer Community website. We will update our roadmap for Visual Studio for Mac once a quarter to reflect any significant changes. We will also post an update to our roadmap for Visual Studio soon.
Today we are announcing the release of Visual Studio for Mac version 7.6. Our focus with this release has been to improve product reliability in various areas, with a special focus on the code editing experience. We have also made several fixes that improve IDE performance. Finally, we’ve extended our support for Azure functions with the addition of new templates and the ability to publish your function to Azure from within the IDE.
This post highlights the major improvements in this release. To see the complete list of changes, check out the Visual Studio for Mac version 7.6 Release Notes. You can get started by downloading the new release or updating your existing install to the latest build available in the Stable channel.
Improving reliability of the Code Editor
We’ve focused our attention on improving the reliability of the code editor in Visual Studio for Mac and have addressed several issues with the code editor. In particular, we want to highlight the following fixes to issues many of you have reported:
- We fixed an issue where Quick Fix menu items don’t display if source analysis is disabled.
- We also addressed a widely reported issue where tooltips wouldn’t disappear.
- We fixed an issue where IntelliSense seems to fail, resulting in red “squiggles” continuing to hang around in the editor even though there were no errors.
- We improved IntelliSense for F# developers. There was an issue where you could not use “.” for autocompletion, but we’ve fixed this and various other F# IntelliSense issues.
- We made improvements to JavaScript syntax highlighting.
Improving performance of the IDE
Arduino Ide For Visual Studio Mac
One of the top reported bugs in previous releases has been performance issues in the editor. Having a fast and reliable code editor is a fundamental part of any IDE and an important part of any developer’s workflow, so we’ve made some improvements in this area:
- We improved tag-based classification for C# with PR #4740 by reusing existing Visual Studio for Windows code, which should improve typing performance in the editor.
- We now support no-op restore of NuGet packages when opening a solution. This change speeds up NuGet restores on solution load.
We’ve also added many more small fixes that improve startup time and reduce memory consumption of the IDE.
Richer support for Azure Functions
Azure functions are a great way to quickly get up and running with a serverless function in just a few minutes. With this release, we have introduced new templates for you to choose from when creating your Azure Functions project:
These new templates allow you to configure access rights, connection strings, and any other binding properties that are required to configure the function. For information on selecting a template, refer to the Available function templates guide.
Another major part of the Azure functions workflow that we are introducing with this release is publishing of functions from Visual Studio for Mac to the Azure Portal. To publish a function, simply right-click on the project name and select Publish > Publish to Azure. You’ll then be able to publish to an existing Azure App Service or use the publishing wizard to create a new one:
For information on publishing to Azure from Visual Studio for Mac, see the Publishing to Azure guide.
Share your Feedback
Addressing reliability and performance issues in Visual Studio for Mac remains our top priority. Your feedback is extremely important to us and helps us prioritize the issues that are most impacting your workflow. There are several ways that you can reach out to us:
- Use the Report a Problem tool in Visual Studio for Mac.
- We are enhancing the Report a Problem experience by allowing you to report a problem without leaving the IDE. You’ll have the ability to automatically include additional information, such as crash logs, that will help our Engineering team narrow down the root cause of your report more effectively. This will be introduced in an upcoming servicing release to 7.6 that will be available in the Stable channel within the next few weeks.
- You can track your issues on the Visual Studio Developer Community portal where you can ask questions and find answers.
- In addition to filing issues, you can also add your vote or comment on existing issues. This helps us assess the impact of the issue.