Software giant Microsoft today released Visual Studio for Mac, its integrated development environment that contains all the tools you need to develop apps and games for the macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, web, cloud and Android platforms. Previously, Mac owners who wanted to use Microsoft’s development tools needed a Windows computer or a virtual machine.
Available at no charge viavisualstudio.com, Visual Studio for Mac lets you code, debug and diagnose your apps, use version control, collaborate efficiently with other programmers and much more. The Windows maker released a preview of Visual Studio for Maclast November.
“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,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group.
“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.”
As a new member of the Visual Studio family, the integrated development environment allows developers on macOS to build apps for mobile, web, and cloud with Xamarin and .NET Core, as well as games with Unity.
Key highlights include:
System requirements areavailable in a support documenton the Visual Studio website.
Microsoft says the software contains support for Voice Over. Many parts of the user interface, including the editor and solution explorer, have been made accessible through Apple’s assistive technologies.
The software released ahead of Microsoft’s Build 2017 developer conference, which kicks off later this week. In 2105, the companylaunched Visual Studio Code, its free of charge cross-platform code editor for developers.
