At this morning’s Connect(); 2016 keynote, Nat Friedman and James Montemagno introduced Visual Studio for Mac, the newest member of the Visual Studio family.Visual Studio for Mac is a developer environment optimized for building mobile and cloud apps with Xamarin and .NET. It is a one-stop shop for .NET development on the Mac, including Android, iOS, and .NET Core technologies. Sporting a native user interface, Visual Studio for Mac integrates all of the tools you need to create, debug, test, and publish mobile and server applications without compromise, including state of the art APIs and UI designers for Android and iOS.
- Visual Studio For Mac Professional
- Visual Studio Equivalent For Mac
- Visual Studio Equivalent For Mac
- Visual Studio On A Mac
- C++ Visual Studio Mac
- Learn to code with C-sharp on Mac: Set up MonoDevelop to create C# programs on a Mac Visual Studio Code is perfect for writing C# programs, but you can't compile and run them. It's a code editor.
- At this morning’s Connect(); 2016 keynote, Nat Friedman and James Montemagno introduced Visual Studio for Mac, the newest member of the Visual Studio family.Visual Studio for Mac is a developer environment optimized for building mobile and cloud apps with Xamarin and.NET.It is a one-stop shop for.NET development on the Mac, including Android, iOS, and.NET Core technologies.
- Preview – equivalent to the Alpha and Beta channels in Visual Studio for Mac Tip To try out pre-release features, you should download the Visual Studio 2017 Preview installer, which will offer the option to install Preview versions of Visual Studio side-by-Side with the stable (Release) version.
- At home there's my Windows computer, where I program with Visual Studio my.NET/C# stuff. Because I want to program outside, it would be great to have an equivalent IDE for my Mac. Which software are the best solution in my case to have a similar workplace with the same functionality?
Hi, I've recently purchased a macbook and was wondering if there's a visual studio equivalent used for.net development on mac os x? I've recently been using bootcamp so i can run both os x and win. Note to avoid confusion: Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio for Windows and Visual Studio for Mac are three completely different products. I don't think 'coming from a Microsoft environment' is relevant: VS Code is actually an Atom fork, so it will have similar pros/cons.
Both C# and F# are supported out of the box and our project templates provide developers with a skeleton that embodies the best practices to share code across mobile front ends and your backend. Our new Connected Application template gives you both your Android and iOS front ends, as well as its complementary .NET Core-powered backend.
Once you’re up and running, you’ll find the same Roslyn-powered compiler, IntelliSense code completion, and refactoring experience you would expect from a Visual Studio IDE. And, since Visual Studio for Mac uses the same MSBuild solution and project format as Visual Studio, developers working on Mac and Windows can share projects across Mac and Windows transparently.
With multi-process debugging, you can use Visual Studio for Mac to debug both your front end application as well as your backend simultaneously.
Visual Studio for Mac provides an amazing experience for creating mobile apps, from integrated designers to the code editing experience to the packaging and publishing tools. It is complemented by:
Visual Studio For Mac Professional
- The full power of the beloved-by-millions C# 7 programming language
- Complete .NET APIs for Android, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and macOS
- The Xamarin.Forms API abstraction to maximize code sharing
- Access to thousands of .NET libraries on NuGet.org to accelerate your mobile development
- Highly optimized native code backed by the LLVM optimizing compiler
But we know apps don’t stop at the client, which is why I am so excited about what Visual Studio for Mac brings to backend development, as well.
Check out the release notes for a complete list of what’s included in this product.
It is rare these days for mobile applications to run in isolation; most of them have a backend that does the heavy lifting and connects users.
You can use .NET Core to build your own backend services and deploy these to your Windows or Linux servers on Visual Studio for Mac, while the project templates will get you up and running with an end-to-end configuration.
Additionally developers can easily integrate Azure mobile services into their application for things like push notifications, data storage, and user accounts and authentication with Azure App Services. This is available in the new “Connected Services” project node.
Whether you are rolling out a custom backend with ASP.NET Core, or consuming pre-packaged Azure services, Visual Studio for Mac will be there for you.
Check out the release notes for a complete list of what’s included in this product.
Today we released the first preview of Visual Studio for Mac, a member of the Visual Studio family, and the story is just beginning. In the coming months we will be working with the Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code teams to bring more features that you love to the Mac, from advanced Web editing capabilities to support for more programming languages via the Server Language Protocol.
Visit the Visual Studio for Mac page and take it for a spin. We look forward to hearing your feedback!
| Miguel de Icaza, Distinguished Engineer, Mobile Developer Tools @migueldeicaza Miguel is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, focused on the mobile platform and creating delightful developer tools. With Nat Friedman, he co-founded both Xamarin in 2011 and Ximian in 1999. Before that, Miguel co-founded the GNOME project in 1997 and has directed the Mono project since its creation in 2001, including multiple Mono releases at Novell. Miguel has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 Free Software Award, the MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year Award in 1999, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 innovators for the new century in September 2000. |
As a .NET developer, I’ve spent most of my time coding on Windows machines. It’s only logical: Visual Studio is the richest development experience for building C# and VB.NET applications, and it only runs on Windows…right?
When I joined Stormpath to work on our open-source .NET authentication library, I was handed a MacBook Pro and given an interesting challenge: can a Mac be an awesome .NET development platform?
To my surprise, the answer is yes! I’ll share how I turned a MacBook Pro into the ultimate Visual Studio development machine.
How to Run Visual Studio on a Mac
Visual Studio doesn’t run natively on OS X, so my first step was to get Windows running on my MacBook Pro. (If you want an editor that does run natively, Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio Code might fit the bill).
There are multiple options for running Windows on a Mac. Every Mac comes with Apple’s Boot Camp software, which helps you install Windows into a separate partition. To switch between OSes, you need to restart.
Parallels is a different animal: it runs Windows (or another guest OS) inside a virtual machine. This is convenient because you don’t have to restart your computer to switch over to Windows. Instead, Windows runs in an OS X application window.
I found that a combination of both worked best for me. I installed Windows into a Boot Camp partition first, and then turned that partition into an active Parallels virtual machine. This way, I have the option of using Windows in the virtual machine, or restarting to run Windows natively at full speed.
I was initially skeptical of the performance of a heavy application like Visual Studio running in a virtual machine. The option to restart to Windows via Boot Camp gave me a fallback in case Visual Studio was sluggish.
There are some minor disadvantages to this method: you can’t pause the virtual machine or save it to a snapshot. A non-Boot Camp virtual machine doesn’t have these limitations. This guide will work regardless of what type of virtual machine you create.
After three months of serious use, and some tweaks, I’ve been very impressed with Parallels’ performance. I haven’t needed to boot directly to Windows at all. (For comparison, my host machine is a 15” mid-2015 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB flash drive.)
In the remainder of this guide, I’ll detail the steps I took to optimize both Parallels and Visual Studio to run at peak performance.
Installing Windows With Boot Camp and Parallels
This part’s easy. I followed Apple’s Boot Camp guide to install Windows in a separate partition.
Visual Studio Equivalent For Mac
Then, I installed Parallels and followed the Parallels Boot Camp guide to create a new virtual machine from the existing Boot Camp partition.
Tweaking Parallels for Performance and Usability
The Parallels team publishes guidelines on how to maximize the performance of your virtual machine. Here’s what I adopted:
Virtual machine settings:
- 2 virtual CPUs
- 4096MB system memory
- 256MB graphics memory
Parallels options:
- Optimization: Faster virtual machine, Adaptive hypervisor, Tune Windows for speed all turned on.
- Sharing: Shared cloud, SmartMount, and Access Windows folders from Mac turned off, as I didn’t need these for my workflow.
I experimented with both of Parallels’ presentation modes, Coherence and Full Screen. While it was cool to see my Windows apps side-by-side with OS X in Coherence mode, I found that the UI responsiveness (especially opening and closing windows and dialogs) felt sluggish.
Because of this, I use Full Screen exclusively now. I have Windows full-screen on my external Thunderbolt display, and OS X on my laptop. If I need to use OS X on my large monitor, I can swipe the Magic Mouse to switch desktops.
Adjusting OS X and Windows Features
I fixed a few annoyances and performance drains right off the bat:
- Function keys. If you’re using the Mac keyboard, you’ll want to change the function key behavior so the F1-F12 keys work correctly in Visual Studio. From System Preferences – Keyboard, make sure Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys is checked. With this turned on, hold Fn to use the Mac functions (brightness, volume, etc.) on F1-F12. With an external non-Mac keyboard, this isn’t an issue.
Start menu. I’m using Windows 8, and the removal of the Start menu annoyed me. I clung to my old ways and installed Start8 to restore it.
Disable Windows visual effects. I turned off most of the Windows desktop manager visual effects by going to Control Panel – System and Security – Advanced system settings – Advanced – Performance – Settings – Visual Effects and choosing Adjust for best performance. However, I left Smooth edges of screen fonts checked because it improves text rendering on my monitor.
Installing Visual Studio and Helpful Extensions
Installing Visual Studio is a piece of cake once the virtual machine is set up. I simply downloaded the latest release from MSDN and let the installer run.
Visual Studio Equivalent For Mac
If you use an Apple Magic Mouse (as I do), Visual Studio tends to be overly eager to zoom the text size in and out as you swipe your finger over the mouse. The Disable Mouse Wheel Zoom add-on fixes this annoyance.
Visual Studio On A Mac
Improving Visual Studio for Performance
C++ Visual Studio Mac
I was impressed with how well Visual Studio performed under emulation. With a large multi-project solution open, though, I saw some slowdowns.
Through trial and error, I found a number of things that could be disabled to improve performance. You may not want to make all of the changes I did, so pick and choose your own list of tweaks:
- Disable hardware-accelerated rendering. Unchecking Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance, Enable rich client visual experience, and Use hardware graphics acceleration if available via Options – Environment made the UI feel much more responsive on my machine.
Start up to an empty environment. Starting up Visual Studio for the first time feels a lot snappier if you skip the default news page on startup. Select Empty environment under Options – Environment – Startup – At startup.
Remove unused extensions. Visual Studio ships with a number of extensions that you may not need. From Tools – Extensions and Updates – Installed, remove any extensions you aren’t actively using (you can always reinstall them later). I got rid of six extensions I didn’t need.
Disable extra debugging features. I turned off both Enable Diagnostic Tools while debugging and Show elapsed time PerfTip while debugging in Options – Debugging – General. I wasn’t using these debugging features, and debugging felt snappier after I disabled them.
Turn off the Navigation Bar. I found the code editor Navigation Bar to be unnecessary if the Solution Explorer is open. I disabled it via Options – Text Editor – All Languages – Navigation Bar.
Disable CodeLens. CodeLens is a cool feature for collaboration, but it’s not part of my current workflow. I got rid of the CPU overhead by turning it off via Options – Text Editor – All
Languages – CodeLens – Enable CodeLens.Turn off Track Changes. When a file is open in the code editor, Visual Studio will represent recent changes by displaying small regions of green or yellow on the scroll bar. If you can live without this, turn off Track changes via Options – Text Editor – General for a small performance boost.
Turn off Track Active Item. Squeeze out a little bit more UI performance out by ensuring Track Active Item in Solution Explorer is unchecked under Options – Projects and Solutions – General.
Visual Studio on a Mac: The Best of Both Worlds
With these tweaks, I’ve come to love using Visual Studio on a Mac. The performance is good, and by running Windows in a virtual machine, I get the best of both OS worlds.
Want to see what I’m building with this setup? Check out our open-source .NET SDK on Github.
Do you have any other tricks you’ve used to improve Visual Studio performance? Any must-have add-ons that boost your productivity? Leave me a comment below!