The Day one keynote from Microsoft’s Build 2017 conference is currently live and some much-awaited announcements have already started pouring. Developers rejoice, Visual Studio is finally out of preview and is officially available for download on Mac devices. The coding tool was first released in beta preview back in November of last year.
The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) has been made available on Mac about a couple later than its release on Windows earlier this year. This falls in the line with the company’s announcement for the release date, which had been set towards the end of April — to match with the conference. This release is aimed at making Microsoft’s developer tools easily accessible to all, without the restriction of any platform.
Visual Studio for Mac brings the developer productivity you love to the Mac. The experience has been meticulously crafted to optimize the developer workflow for the Mac.
This is the first time Microsoft’s flagship coding tool has made its way across and into Apple’s territory. The support for Visual Studio 2017 on MacOS has been made possible by leveraging and optimizing its cross-platform developer service Xamarin, which it acquired last year. This now allows developers to build apps on the platform without having to worry about switching workstations — between one that’s Windows or MacOS.
Talking about the release, Microsoft in a statement earlier stated,
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.
Much like the usual functionality of the IDE, the Mac version also brings along collaboration tools — for efficient code management via access to Git repositories, Xamarin’s advanced debugging and profiling tools, and build apps for any platform — MacOS, Android, iOS and Windows. And as announced on stage, all Azure cloud upgrades will also be made available to Visual Studio 2017 users across all platforms.
If you’re a Mac user and had already been running the preview build of Visual Studio 2017 then you will soon be able to upgrade your IDE to the general release candidate. And if not, then head over here to download the IDE right away — where Microsoft is offering a developer access to free, extended 60-day trial of Xamarin University. It includes live online classes on how to get coding with Visual Studio for Mac.
