When the preview of was announced at Microsoft’s online developer event, Connect, in 2016, it was based on the existing Xamarin Studio for Mac OS and it only for developing mobile apps. The release version announced at Build 2017 is supported for use in production, and it includes several new workloads. “Now it’s mobile plus cloud and ASP.NET. You can create new.NET Core apps, debug them and deploy them straight to Azure. We also have gaming with Unity support,” says Nat Friedman, CEO and oc-founder of Xamarin and now corporate vice president of mobile developer tools at Microsoft. You can still build mobile apps for iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and Mac OS, with Xamarin and C#, and that now includes building mobile backends in ASP.NET Core. Xamarin Forms support is for Mac OS (and in development for GTK# for Linux), so your ‘mobile’ app can also act as a desktop app.

Cartload of features: You can combine multiple PDFs just by dragging and dropping files into a window, edit existing PDFs with just a few clicks, add text, change text, play around with the font of existing PDFs, and even save PDFs as Word or Excel files without any hassle. Applications download acrobat reader for mac. Besides, Adobe offers detailed online tutorials.

But web developers can also now use Visual Studio for Mac for.NET Core, ASP.NET Core, HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. You can also use it for Unity development and debugging on Mac; there’s a new Unity-specific solution explorer view and syntax highlighting for script. And yes, that includes developing for HoloLens. “Developers who use the Mac can stay in an environment that they’re more comfortable in and still build those kind of applications and target what I think is the strongest attempt at mixed reality,” confirms Friedman.

Visual Studio for Mac is a new member of the Visual Studio family, enabling developers on macOS to build apps for mobile, web, and cloud with Xamarin and.NET Core, as well as games with Code fast, debug, and diagnose with ease, test often, and release with confidence. Use version control, be agile. I have windows 7 pro 64 bit sp1 and have been using Visual Studio pro 2008. I use 2008 to develop several new projects every year and it works very well. I purchased Visual Studio pro 2017 and it works in development debug mode. The publisher function doesn't work, I followed the instructions on the Microsoft web site to fix the problem.

Just like Visual Studio on Windows, there are multiple versions of Visual Studio for Mac; the free Community edition, the Professional version that includes subscription benefits, and the Enterprise edition (all of which are available to download). You’ll need to be online throughout the installation; an offline installer is promised for a later release. Visual Studio for Mac will be getting updates every six to eight weeks, just as Visual Studio for Windows and Visual Studio Code do. The first new features are already available as previews: deploying and debugging.NET Core and ASP.NET Core code in Docker containers, building, deploying and debugging Azure Functions (event-based serverless programming) and building C# and Xamarin code for IoT devices like Android Things. Other areas that the team are looking at including adding more languages, using the same open source that’s used by Visual Studio Code, and making the extensions frameworks for Visual Studio more similar on Windows and Mac.

Don’t think of this as just a new name for Xamarin Studio. Yes, Visual Studio for Mac is based on the MonoDevelop core, and it will replace Xamarin Studio for Mac users in time, but that core has been extended significantly to support working with.NET Core and Unity and deploying to Azure. And much of that code comes from Visual Studio on Windows. Even before Microsoft bought Xamarin “we had already begun to share a lot of really important code with Visual Studio,” explains Friedman. “The biggest example was Roslyn; we replaced our own autocomplete engine with Roslyn and got much better results. Now we’re sharing more code with Visual Studio and with Visual Studio Code.

All the work that we’re doing to deploy from Visual Studio for Mac to Azure, and to Azure Functions, to remotely debug production code in Azure, to use; that’s all shared code with Visual Studio.” “Additionally, to support the non-mobile workloads like ASP.NET Core we needed autocomplete, and syntax highlighting when you’re editing HTML, JavaScript and CSS. A lot of that also is also borrowed from Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio. When you use a Visual Studio login, the Microsoft login code is shared.” And just like MonoDevelop, when code from Visual Studio is used in Visual Studio for Mac, it’s also being made open source. Over time, Visual Studio for Mac will share even more code with Visual Studio on Windows. “We’re just looking more and more opportunities because there’s no need to repeat work,” Friedman points out. It’s also high-quality code that’s easy to reuse, says Xamarin co-founder and now Microsoft distinguished engineer Miguel de Icaza. “The code for Visual Studio is just incredibly well architected.