Microsoft Build has always been a time when we deliver a wealth of developer-focused announcements. It’s an opportunity to share our vision for developer experiences across mobile, AR/VR, cloud, web, desktop, IoT and AI. This year, I’m excited to have brought this vision to life with more than a few exciting announcements:
Download Visual Studio Code to experience a redefined code editor, optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. Download Visual Studio Code - Mac, Linux, Windows This site uses cookies for analytics, personalized content and ads. Visual Studio Code has built in Git support, but very few know how to use it on OSX with GitHub. Even in the official docs, there is only a few paragraphs on it. In this post, I’ll show you how I set it up.
For an overview of announcements across the company, check out Scott Guthrie’s blog post; but for a round-up of Visual Studio and .NET headlines, read on.
.NET Core 2.1 RC
As of today, .NET Core 2.1 Release Candidate (RC) is available with a “Go-Live” license to use in production. .NET Core 2.1 improves on previous releases with hard-won performance gains and many new features:
- ASP.NET Core SignalR. Developers have been using SignalR to build real-time web communication solutions since 2013 on the .NET Framework. The stack has been streamlined and improved to run on the cross-platform and higher performance .NET Core runtime. We also released SignalR as an Azure service.
- ASP.NET Core web platform enhancements including support for Razor UI in class libraries, improvements in building WebAPIs, security enhancements, a new Identity UI library and HttpClientFactory.
- Entity Framework Core 2.1 introduces significant capabilities like lazy loading, data seeding, value conversions, query types, and GroupBy translation.
- .NET Core 2.1 significantly improves build & runtime performance. It also introduces a new deployment and extensibility model for global tools.
- ASP.NET Core 2.1 is more than 15% faster than version 2.0. This means that when ASP.NET Core is released, it will top the TechEmpower benchmarks as the fastest mainstream web framework on the planet.
Of course, .NET Core remains free, cross-platform, and open source – just as it has been since 2014.
Learn more about .NET Core 2.1 RC.
Future of Windows Desktop Development
While we’re excited to release .NET Core 2.1 RC, we’re not stopping there. Today, we introduced the roadmap for .NET Core 3, which brings desktop development to our open source .NET stack. We are adding Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Forms on top of .NET Core. As always, developers building Universal Windows Platform apps will also continue to benefit from all the .NET Core improvements.
.NET Core 3.0 will enable Windows desktop apps use a globally installed .NET, or an app local copy, or build a single .EXE which includes .NET. Thus, .NET apps will no longer be impacted by system-wide updates. More importantly, this will allow us to make improvements to WPF and Windows Forms that we previously could not have done with .NET Framework without risking compatibility to existing apps
With .NET Core 3.0, developers will have the ability to share and easily integrate UI controls across all the major Windows desktop frameworks. You’ll be able to incorporate whatever UI controls make the most sense for your scenario, or even take a phased migration approach to modernizing your app’s UI. Developers will be able to seamlessly integrate almost all the Windows 10 API surface area into their .NET apps such as Cortana, Windows Hello, Windows ML, Rome, and more. And developers will be able to take advantage of the performance improvements and new API’s in .NET Core.
Developers targeting .NET Framework 4.8, the next version of .NET Framework, will also benefit from the improvements we plan to make such as the new Edge-based WebView control that they can host inside their apps, with more controls planned. And support for XAML Islands bringing UWP UI into existing applications.
This roadmap represents a significant investment in Windows desktop development by empowering developers to adopt the latest innovations in Windows 10 and .NET Core in their WPF and Windows Forms apps.
Visual Studio 2017, version 15.7
Our flagship IDE, Visual Studio, received a significant upgrade today with the announcement of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7. John Montgomery’s blog post has a full run-down of all the new capabilities, but some of the more significant headlines include:
- Cloud development: You’ll find several improvements to the project scaffolding and unit testing. Additionally, you can publish Helm charts directly to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). You can now also directly publish .NET applications to Kubernetes containers. For your ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core applications, you can configure the Key Vault connected service directly from the IDE.
- Debugging: IntelliTrace’s new step-back debugging, first shipped in Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5, is now available for .NET Core applications. The feature automatically takes a snapshot of your application on each breakpoint and debugger step so you can step “back in time” to view previous application states.
- MSVC C++ 17 conformance: Today, we are happy to announce we have reached full C++ 17 conformance in MSVC with Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7. We also added ClangFormat support for C++ developers in the IDE. Developers can use ClangFormat to automatically style and format your code as you type, in a way that can be enforced across your development team.
- Python: This release contains an opt-in preview of the Python debugger based on the popular open source pydevd debug engine, offering improved performance for many debugging scenarios.
- iOS and Android mobile development with Xamarin: The XAML editing experience has been greatly improved with full IntelliSense support. iOS devices can be provisioned for development with a single click, saving developers a lot of time and steps. Android and iOS project templates have been re-written to use the latest modern navigation patterns and are now better organized for improved discoverability.
Gitignore Visual Studio Github
Visual Studio for Mac, version 7.5
Visual Studio 2017 wasn’t the only IDE to get an update. Today, we’re announcing Visual Studio for Mac version 7.5. This release includes bug fixes, performance improvements, and several new features:
- New editors for Razor, JavaScript, and TypeScript for building web projects
- Updated UI and templates for building serverless solutions with Azure Functions and .NET Core
- .NET Standard Library projects are now a fully supported option for sharing code between platforms when building Xamarin.Forms solutions.
- Preview support for Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) in Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) has arrived addressing one of our top UserVoice requests. Developers now have the option to use the existing Git source control integration or the new TFVC integration to manage their code.
Xamarin.Forms 3.0 General Availability
Today, we’re announcing immediate availability of Xamarin.Forms 3.0. Xamarin.Forms 3.0 delivers improved stability, faster performance, and new capabilities aimed at making it easier for you to create beautiful apps that work on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows devices.
Xamarin.Forms 3.0 now builds with .NET Standard 2.0 using multi-targeting, while still maintaining support for PCL profiles and other .NET Standard versions. Projects load much faster when you use .NET Standard project types.
Xamarin.Forms 3.0 also includes a strong focus on developer productivity. Many developers are already familiar with the Visual State Manager already found in XAML for UWP and WPF. It’s now available for Xamarin.Forms, too. We’ve also heard from many ASP.NET developers who can build amazing layouts for the web using Flexbox and CSS. To empower these developers to build equally impressive layouts on mobile, we’ve added two features to Xamarin.Forms: FlexLayout and CSS. Xamarin.Forms 3.0 introduces both features without compromising the existing XAML experience desktop developers have come to know and love. Finally, because Xamarin apps are deployed globally, we also included right-to-left language support and many quality improvements in the 3.0 release.
Visual Studio Live Share Public Preview
Today, we announced the public preview of Visual Studio Live Share. Now any developer can use Live Share to collaborate in real-time with other developers, with instant bi-directional collaboration directly from their existing tools like Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio Code. With Visual Studio Live Share:
- It doesn’t matter if the developer sharing doesn’t use the same editor or have the same OS as you; join a Live Share session from your own development environment. No need to install project- specific dependencies or configure runtimes. You’ll view the project in your development tool, retaining all your customizations and themes.
- Each team member in a Live Share session can separately open files, navigate, edit, and refactor code. Your changes are instantly reflected in your teammate’s editor. You can quickly jump to a teammate’s location and see their cursor as they make edits or pin to follow their actions. Want to focus their attention? Highlight a piece of code and it will highlight on their screen as well.
- Use Live Share with any language on any application pattern, including serverless, cloud native, and IoT development. At Connect() 2017, we showed Live Share working with JavaScript and Node.js. Today, Live Share supports nearly every language supported by your development tool, including C#, Python, Java, Go, C++, and
- Full-context sharing – Use Live Share to collaborate across all parts of your development workflow: co-editing, shared debugging, shared terminals, and shared servers (ports).
Git Repository Visual Studio
Visual Studio IntelliCode
Visual Studio IntelliCode is a new capability that enhances everyday software development with the power of AI. Today, IntelliCode provides intelligent suggestions to improve developer productivity and code quality in the tool that developers love, Visual Studio. Our vision is to apply AI to empower developers across the entire development lifecycle.
At Build, we shared a sneak peak of IntelliCode, showing how it uses AI to deliver better context-aware code completions, guide developers to code to the patterns and styles of their team, find difficult-to-catch code issues, and focus code reviews on areas that really matter.
Developers can sign up for news and a future private preview, as well as gain access to an experimental extension at http://aka.ms/intellicode
Send us Your Feedback
Our developer tools and services are shaped by your feedback, so please let us know what you think. To download, install and read documentation for all today’s announcements, go to:
If you have any trouble, you can report a problem from inside the IDE on both Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac.
To track issues, ask questions and find answers, explore the Visual Studio Developer Community. Or, to engage with our team and other Visual Studio developers in real-time chat, try our new Gitter community (requires GitHub account). We welcome your product suggestions through UserVoice. And, should you need it, you can also get free installation help through Live Chat Support.
Finally, don’t forget that we have three full days of announcements, deep dives, and developer interviews to share. You can live-stream or watch on-demand video later from the Microsoft Build website.
Happy coding.
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.
Visual Studio For Mac Git
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.
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.
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.