Microsoft has its own developer environment called Visual Studio — one that’s been absent from Macs. But that looks to be changing, as reported by The Verge. The publication notes that Microsoft may have published its unveiling a bit early, as the company quickly pulled the blog post from public eyes after it went live.
Microsoft has officially released the new Visual Studio for Mac today. It had confirmed several months ago that a new version of the development suite was in the pipeline and had even released a preview version which developers have been using for quite a few months now. The company announced at its BUILD conference in Seattle today that the new Visual Studio for Mac is now ready and has thus been released for Apple’s computers.
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Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac can be used to create applications for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and Android. It can even be used to build apps for the web and the cloud. Some great new features have been added to the development suite, including but not limited to multi-platform app templates and Git integration.
Visual Studio for Mac relies on .NET Core and Xamarin which enables it to allow developers to use the suite for developing multi-platform applications. Developers will thus be able to take full advantage of all the capabilities that it offers, including the ability to develop games based on Unity, which is one of the most widely used commercial game platforms.
Visual Studio had been a Windows-only app until November last year when Microsoft released the first preview of Visual Studio for Mac.
Interested developers can now get all of the core Visual Studio downloads for free from Microsoft. However, a paid subscription may be required for professional use.
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Thanks to integration with Xamarin, a cross-platform software development company that Microsoft acquired last year, Visual Studio encourages macOS and iOS developers 'to use Microsoft’s development tools, since they will no longer need a Windows computer or virtual machine to do so.' Xamarin Studio is expected to eventually close for good following a full integration into Microsoft.
“Developers get a great IDE and a single environment to not only work on end-to-end solutions — from mobile and web apps to games — but also to integrate with and deploy to Azure,” Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group, said in a statement. “Whether you use C#, F#, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Xamarin or Unity, you’ll get a best-in-class development environment, natively designed for the Mac.”Visual Studio has been designed natively for macOS, according to Microsoft, letting developers manage their code hosted by any provider, including GitHub and Visual Studio Team Services. Developers can build, connect, and tune native mobile apps for iOS, macOS, and Android while also having the ability to create web applications thanks to support for ASP.NET Core. In terms of programming languages, the C# and F# languages are supported.
There are three different versions of Visual Studio for Mac that users can download, including Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Professional, and Visual Studio Enterprise. Microsoft markets Community as its free, but 'fully-featured,' IDE for students and individual developers. Professional targets small teams with subscription benefits, while more 'demanding' users and projects with larger scale are suggested to look into Enterprise.
For its cloud subscriptions, there are yearly and monthly options available to users interested in the higher-tier Visual Studio plans. An annual subscription to Visual Studio Professional costs $539/year while a monthly subscription costs $45/month. For Visual Studio Enterprise, users will pay $2,999/year or $250/month. Subscribers will be able to earn small credits back each month for the yearly tiers, contingent on their use of different Azure services.
For a detailed breakdown of the differences between each Visual Studio subscription, including individual licenses, check out the app's new website.
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