Xamarin Visual Studio 2017 Osx Mac OS X Became
Xamarin Visual Studio 2017 Osx Portable Visual Studio
Xamarin Visual Studio 2017 Osx Series Of Books

Connected Xamarin Forms apps are in C and include a.Net Core mobile services app.

Visual Studio for Mac is something that many Microsoft developers have sought for more than a decade.

Xamarin Visual Studio 2017 Osx Mac OS X Became

As Mac OS X became interesting in the early 2000s, coders who spent most of their days working in Visual Studio on Windows wondered why they couldnt use the same languages, frameworks, and tools for the Mac, rather than needing to learn Objective-C, Cocoa, and Xcode, all of which were substantially different from the languages and tools for Windows development.

Xamarin Visual Studio 2017 Osx Series Of Books

I for one had no idea it would take so long, although I was aware of at least some of the rather Byzantine politics going on among the various interested parties, through my involvement with the.Net series of books.

I was also aware of the reputation that both Mono and Xamarin had for being a bit crashy.

Xamarin Visual Studio 2017 Osx Portable Visual Studio

The introduction of the lightweight, portable Visual Studio Code, and the gradual integration of Xamarin tools into Visual Studio 2015, were positive signs in my view.

Once Microsoft announced it would acquire Xamarin (in February 2016) it became clear to me that the Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio IDEs were likely to merge on the Mac to create a single development environment, but I wasnt sure exactly what form it would take or how many of the features from Visual Studio for Windows could or would be implemented on the Mac.

Essentially, Visual Studio for the Mac is Xamarin Studio plus a Visual Studio look and feel, along with Roslyn-based C IntelliSense, refactoring, analyzers, and code fixes; NuGet-based package management; a Visual Studio-compatible project format; the MSBuild engine; integrated unit testing; and support for F.

Lets unwrap that a little to understand what it means, in case you arent familiar with both Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio.

In general terms Visual Studio for Mac is an integrated Macintosh development environment for C and F applications that run on iOS, Android, and Mac targets, with a variety of application forms and technologies, including game engines.

Some support iOS and Android with Xamarin, and others support iOS and Mac games with SpriteKit (2D) and SceneKit (3D).

Youll find intelligent editing everywhere you work with C files, including autocompletion as shown in the figure below.

When you hover over a variable or method name youll see an informational pop-up about it.

When you right-click or control-click on code, youll see a context menu offering whatever actions are appropriate, such as code fixes, navigation to declarations and references, and refactoring.

NuGet is the package manager for Visual Studio; it downloads and updates references on demand.

As long as you and the NuGet server have good connectivity, it works well.

The point of using a compatible project format and the same MSBuild engine is that a team doesnt need to standardize on a single development platform.

Team members working from Macs and Windows PCs can collaborate on a single iOS andor Android project.

IntelliSense works for C files no matter what platform you are targeting.

The Roslyn compilers underpin this and other intelligent-editing features.

True to form, the relatively small online installer for Visual Studio for Mac in turn downloads and installs a huge bag of stuff from various places, including the whole Android SDK.

Of course, given that I was trying the installation within a day of the product announcement, the download failed multiple times, at various points, and took hours.

On the third or fourth try it mostly succeeded, except for the Xamarin Profiler.

Visual Studio for Mac has a layout and menu structure that should be familiar to Visual Studio developers, along with the multiplatform features of Xamarin Forms and targets for iOS, tvOS, Android, MacOS,.Net Core, and ASP.Net.