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I find the naming "Visual Studio for Mac" pretty deceptive, since apparently it is not anything like the win32 VS environment, but instead based on Xamarin Studio. Even the tagline is deceptive: "The IDE you love, now on the Mac".

I would guess this won't let you build/debug win32 or winforms or wpf applications, or install any .vsix extensions from the visual studio marketplace (of which there are lots of useful ones, such as this one to manage translations - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TomEngle... ) - correct me if I'm wrong, but if I can't install my .vsix extensions, this is not "the IDE you love, now on the Mac".

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Hi, Rajen Kishna here, Product Manager on Visual Studio for Mac. Our goal with Visual Studio for Mac is to create a native IDE for Mac users with workloads that make sense on macOS. That means "desktop app" development will target macOS and Visual Studio (on Windows) can be used to target Windows.

The core of the IDE definitely has a heritage in Xamarin Studio, but this release has brought in so much more with .NET Core/ASP.NET Core development for web apps/services, Unity support for game development and cloud integration with directly publishing your web apps/services and previews of Docker and Azure Functions coming very soon.

Extensions is definitely another area we're looking to align more over time. Currently, there is an extensions framework, but you're right that it's different from the one used on Windows.

Definitely keep the feedback coming, we're listening and looking to act and prioritize accordingly!

I just want to cross compile Win32 apps on Mac, please.

What about C++ support?

We will be adding support for more languages over time.

Our focus for the initial release was to get our .NET Mobile, Cloud and Unity components in place.

We have a solid pipeline of new features, stay tuned for more details on my Visual Studio for Mac talk today.

Sounds like its a long jump to say "its the same IDE you love, on the mac"

It sounds like its BASED on the same IDE, but fundamentally provides a completely different feature set, and ability to compile to completely different platforms. That's fundamental enough to suggest its not the same IDE.

If anything, MS is simply capitalizing on the brand recognition, and taking a similar approach. But if the extensions don't work on Mac - its not the same.

That's like saying "Microsoft Word, the same word processor you love, on a mac" and then not support .docx files.

It's not even based on the same IDE. It's based on MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio and really all that's different is the name.

I was quite excited until I realized I cannot use this with c++.

I would like to add that we have been reusing a lot of the existing code from Visual Studio in Visual Studio for Mac.

The code for Visual Studio is just incredibly well architected. It is a design jewel - the core components are independent of the UI, and were already cross platform. It was a great surprise for us.

What you see now is the first drop, we are adding many new capabilities in the coming months as more code is ported over.

My primary IDE is Xamarin Studio for both mobile and asp.net development.

Is there a roadmap for Xamarin Studio?

Xamarin Studio users will be upgraded to Visual Studio for Mac ;-)

I am sure it is a nice product, but the name is causing confusion. In the last few months I have witnessed misunderstandings between clients and consultants who think they agree to deliver a project as a "visual studio solution/project", and only when deliverables start being passed around do they realize that the original win32 visual studio is not the same as the other visual studio offerings, and that you cannot just expect the other offerings to produce the win32 visualstudio .sln and .csproj solution project files or anything that builds with msbuild.exe out of the box etc.

I get how this might happen, but that sounds like there are some fundamental problems at the place where you saw that, I mean if you think that "Windows Phone" for example is the same as "Windows" on your laptop then that I don't think it is Microsoft's fault.

But what if "Windows Phone" was marketed as "The Operating System And Desktop Environment you love, now on your phone"? :)

I think that's pretty consistent with the One Windows marketing. Personally, I'd rather have a tool that works with some of the features I want, rather than none of the features I want, because they're taking 5 years to get to feature parity. But that's just me.

How is that even possible? You'd want to specify version numbers for a solution file even if you were keeping things purely in the Windows realm.

Easy. "We are expecting the most recent available version of Visual Studio (by the time the contract is signed)".

Step one level up above the trenches and the people you meet haven't had the time (or even skills) necessary to study the details to determine the fact that "Visual Studio for Mac" is, in fact, not the latest version of Visual Studio in the slightest. And why should they. Delivering a visual studio solution should be as unambiguous as delivering an excel sheet.

That's really interesting. You're not talking about finance or engineering, but yes, it certainly seems possible that there's a business that does things that way.

It's nice that a lot of the components were already cross-platform. Does this mean we're going to see a Visual Studio for Linux?

Has Microsoft announced whether MonoDevelop will still be open source?

Yes, MonoDevelop is still open source, it is still at the core of the system.

Visual Studio for Mac is built as a series of components on top of the open source MonoDevelop.

When we touch the core, it goes open source, and some of the extensions like Android and iOS development are closed source.

Any possibility of eventually getting it for Ubuntu then? I've been using Rider.. but it's buggy as hell on linux.

(for context, @migueldeicaza is the founder/CTO of Xamarin and the creator of Mono)

> It is a design jewel

Then I need to ask... why is it so bloated and slow?

...and still 32bit in a 64 bit world

There are valid reasons for that [0]. Would you accept slower compile times and more memory usage just so you could have a 64-bit version of visual studio that your project probably wouldn't even need?

0: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-stu...

That was 8 years ago. Surely things have changed...!

Physics haven't changed. If you double the size of all your pointers, you effectively reduce the available CPU cache. It will be slower.

Code can be well designed from an architectural perspective and still be slow in areas. I imagine it's due to the minimal feature set (which MS defined). Stuff constantly happening in the background when you click or type something, bottlenecks become more apparent with really large projects and they just haven't dedicated time to improving that, etc.

I realize that architecture can't be separated from functionality, but I think the parent was focused on modularity and the ability to reuse various components.

I'm guessing you haven't tried Xcode or Eclipse.

> Definitely keep the feedback coming

> Our goal with Visual Studio for Mac is to create a native IDE for Mac users...That means "desktop app" development will target macOS.

Feedback: This target ghettoizing mentality seriously hurts my workflow. I just want to cross compile to target Windows. I want to make Win32 MFC C++ executables without having to boot into an operating system (Windows 10) that I never want to use on my development laptop for anything other than running MSVC. It's literally just a set of headers and object files that will, in even the very worst case, produce more applications targeting your platform. Why does Microsoft continue to keep them walled off?

Sounds like you really hate Microsoft/Windows. Maybe you're not the target market here.

In what universe is people who want to build more Microsoft Windows executables for other users of Microsoft Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio not part of Microsoft's target market? I have an operating system on my computer already. I don't want two.

How will you test those apps? By installing a second OS no doubt. Why not run visual studio inside that, perhaps with vmware or parallels?

I guess I don't understand what sort of developer workflow you can have building windows apps and not actually running windows, even if it's just in a vm.

Yeah, I totally agree with you.

I'll refer you to my other answer to this same question.

Building in a VM is pretty slow.

I do a ton of Windows dev in a VM. It's not that bad.

Because they lose control.

> I just want to cross compile to target Windows.

What's the point, you can't debug or even run such an executable? What developer is just going to compile stuff without testing it? It makes no sense to want this.

sigh

I can and I do. Don't be so unimaginative.

For starters, Wine actually works really well. And beside that, time spent writing code is measurable in weeks while time spent running an executable to test or debug is measurable in minutes. The amount of time spent testing and debugging is a tiny fraction of the time spent coding. RDP/VNCing for one of them every second of the day can be a huge pain in the ass. Doing it for the other once in a while is a minor inconvenience.

Next time just say "I'm glad I don't have that problem" instead of "You can't possibly". A mindset like that ends up making you look foolish, because you'll be wrong most of the time.

Despite the negative tone, I think you are correct about the mentality that leads us to conclude that we have the simple solution for every problem and that others who can't see those simple solutions are clearly not up to par. Comments of the form, "Why don't you just...", usually end with something that doesn't fit the situation, just the mental model of the poster. Over time, and with enough experience, you learn empathy for other developers. You've seen enough adversity to know that we solve problems in different ways. I don't subscribe to absolute relativism, but we have to allow for the practical, not just the theoretical.

That said, we also have to be able to encourage others to present their ideas. We clearly can't grow if we don't hear and consider external ideas. It's a difficult balance to strike.

Wine still doesn't support many Win32 APIs or typical Windows deployment scenarios, specially in the enterprise contexts.

I'm glad that I don't have those problems.

You can run it on a remote computer (or a VM) and debug it from an OS X front-end that connects to the remote-running debugger over the network. It's a pretty common technique, gdb has had it for, what, fiftenn? Twenty years?

Maintaining two separate development environments, on two operating systems that you have to boot into separately is very annoying. Developing for an operating system other than the one you're running is about as old as the personal computer, I think :).

Why not just compile it on the remote computer as well?

If time and cost was no option, sure I'd agree with you. Put everything on everything. But this is such a niche situation that's not worth the cost.

The remote computer is often good enough to run an application but way too slow to productively compile a large codebase on it. Besides, you don't need to maintain two development setups at once.

This is a niche situation only because Microsoft's tools make it a niche situation. It's pretty much how all embedded software on this planet is developed (except that the network is replaced by a serial connection on the lower end of the performance spectrum, of course). In nix world, it's a super-common situation; e.g. at $work, where I write software for networking equipment, no one seriously expects that I'm going to compile stuff on the routers that ends up running that software. Most of them are capable of the required heavy lifting (they have CPUs in the same performance class as a pretty beefy desktop), but why?

We're not talking about just a compiler here. Nobody says "You should try CL.exe, it's really awesome at compiling!" No, they say "Visual Studio is the best C++ IDE you'll ever use." Which is true, but not because of the compiler. And without all the Windows-specific libraries, intellisense and code analysis tools that are second-to-none can't work.

And when will I be able to develop Mac OS X applications on Windows? Probably never. I don't want to boot into another OS or buy a new very expensive computer...

I agree, wouldn't it be nice! Unfortunately delivering Apple's library code might be outside of Microsoft's control.

Kind of amusing considering the platform you (apparently) prefer. However walled Windows is, Apple is at least as bad, if not worse. At least with Windows development one isn't restricted to a particular brand of computer.

> amusing considering the platform you (apparently) prefer.

What, Fedora?

No, Mac. Since this is, after all, a story about VS on Mac, and you didn't make it clear in your comment, it was an inferrence I made.

Alright, well, since we've veered off on this tangent, I prefer Fedora. Between macOS and Windows, I prefer macOS...though I may never get used to the new capitalization scheme. But I don't see why any of that should be a reason to want to boot multiple operating systems in virtual machines. How do the two subjects relate?

I think the relation is that Apple is even more guilty of the thing you were complaining about Microsoft doing.

Uh, I guess? But where did I say I develop Mac apps? God, do I have to lowercase mac now?

I'm not sure where this is getting confusing. You complained that Microsoft's Mac offering doesn't make Windows apps. It was then observed that this is an ironic complaint because development for Apple platforms is way more locked down.

Allow me to rebut: Someone else being bad isn't a reason to be bad. Ok, so it's a reason, but it's not a great reason. Ok, so maybe it's a great reason, but it's not a good reason. Also that's not what irony means. Ok, so maybe it's what a kind of irony means, but only in a new transgenerational sense where someone else implied to themselves something that I never said. Ah, you know what, that's definitely situational irony.

> Why does Microsoft continue to keep them walled off?

The question is backwards. The real question is, why doesn't Microsoft do what is necessary to bridge them. And the answer seems to be simple -- developer man-hours are limited, your use case is not the use case of the majority of people who want a Microsoft development environment on a Mac, they are handling the most common use case, not the edge case.

> The question is backwards.

I don't think so. Win32 with MFC is already in the free VS Community Edition on Windows, so we know that the work to package up those libraries is already done. We also know that Clang and GCC can already cross-compile targeting Windows, all you need are the aforementioned platform libraries.

Visual Studio for Mac is based on Xamarin Studio, which is MonoDevelop. You have to port over everything to support C++ projects to Mac before you can use C++ projects in Visual Studio for Mac. The libraries may be packaged up, they may be portable code, but it's nontrivial. The work is >0. You can argue how close to 0 it is, but it's not like they don't have other work to do.

They already plan to support C++. Boom, done. No, I'm kidding here. I have no idea what they're planning to add. This thread started because it actually looked (I commented on this somewhere else) like it would support C++ from the website interface. I do at least have some reason to believe that they have a C++ dev manager named Steve, and that they will add support for more languages over time.

>Why does Microsoft continue to keep them walled off

Isn't the answer obvious? How many MFC devs are there working primarily in OSX or linux? It has to be tiny, even if they had the ability to do so. Great, I can compile; still need to boot up Windows to run it. My userbase is still 100% windows users. We still use Windows on every PC in my company. So who cares? What's the value proposition here?

Because it doesn't have to be that way. You're just arguing from the "we've always done it that way" perspective. Years ago, I took the extra time to compile a Qt application so that it would run on Windows and Linux with the same code base. Why not? Why not compile for Windows and Mac, and let people choose what works for them? You may have no use for it, but I do. Is it worth the effort? Depends on the application? Is it worth Microsoft's time to support? Obviously not. But at this point, the ability to compile for multiple platforms at the same time shouldn't have to be rocket science for the situations where it makes sense.

That's not my argument at all, but whatever, look at yours. You initially mention MFC, a Windows only technology, and follow that up with a QT example. Well yes; QT is meant to be cross platform! The MFC example made no sense whatsoever.

> Isn't the answer obvious? How many MFC devs are there working primarily in OSX or linux?

None, because you can't, the same reason you don't see many iOS developers using windows. I don't know if there are many people that want to work that way or if it's worth supporting, but your current argument is circular reasoning at it's finest.

Yet Microsoft supports, and was investing heavily in, iOS development in Visual Studio on Windows...

As long as you have a Mac and an iOS device to connect to.

I know, total PITA. Why can't I run my iOS app on Windows?! Screw you M$!

...

My argument was that it makes absolutely no sense to develop an MFC app on OSX. I asumeyou'll want to, you know, run the thing, right? well get out your Windows VM!

C'mon, how is this not completely obvious...

I guess one value proposition is the devs that refuse to work for your company because you're 100% Windows might re-consider if both your company and Microsoft opened this up slightly?

But you still can't run any of the code you write on OSX, so what's the point?

This has already been addressed elsewhere in the thread.

> I want to make Win32 MFC C++ executables without having to boot into an operating system (Windows 10)

How are you going to test your program?

This has already been answered elsewhere in the thread.

How do would you test that your application works at all as it should?

I never believed in cross compilation without testing.

This has already been answered elsewhere in the thread.

I've began using Rider from JetBrains and it's working well on Mac for .NET Core APIs. VS was always better with Resharper (+ few other tools from JetBrains). Actually VS is the best IDE in the Enterprise, especially combined with some 3rd parties tools. Coverage, profiling, refactoring ...

What about support for Linux? I imagine it would be an easy move. At least easier than Win32 to Mac.

tl;dr from above. Yes, he agrees it's deceptively named and they're not going to change it. :(

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

For a moment, i read it as Rajesh Khanna.

Btw pretty excited about the visual studio for mac as current visual studio code user and a huge typescript fan.

I'm calling bullshit. You can't use this for the workload that overwhelming dominates it's typically use on Windows. Further it looks different, and is incompatible with other plug-ins.

Just FYI, your installer seems to be broken for language handling. I'm getting French even though my primary language is English. I can read French fine, but I hope the whole app isn't broken this way. You should respect the preferred language and not force American English on others.

My language settings are:

1. English - Canada

2. English - UK

3. French - Canada

4. Chinese - Simplified

yep, we discovered that delightful bug as well. We've hotfixed it since.

apparently the installer wanted people to practice the languages they've been putting off.

Do you have any insight into a SQL Management Studio for Mac?

SQL Server Management studio is the entire reason I am running a Windows VM. I would love SSMS on Mac.

I'm not sure what you use it for, but I have been really happy with jet brains datagrip product on the mac talking to SQL Server. I know SSMS does a lot of stuff, but for querying, DDL, ETC DataGrip works great.

Microsoft is the worst at naming things.

  * when .Net first come out, everything was suddenly .Net
  * for a while, everything was Live
  * they had two technologies called Win RT
  * they pick names already in use by others (Metro, Skydrive)
  * Visual Studio Code? It's not Visual Studio

Sometimes they do a good job:

  * Edge
  * Xenix
  * Azure
  * XBox

"Surface" started out pretty strong, but I'm not sure it means much anymore.

> Sometimes they do a good job: > * XBox

Oh, do you mean Xbox 1 or Xbox One?

That's a good point. They kinda did the same thing with One -- OneDrive, OneNote, and XBox One.

They bought the company that made OneNote, so I believe it was already a product called OneNote.

Not according to Microsoft:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/chris_pratley/2004/01/30/on...

To be fair the first Xbox was never called the "Xbox 1", it was just called the Xbox.

Except that "Surface" started out as a table, which is now called "PixelSense". Oh, except they've also now started to use "PixelSense" for their Surface Book displays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9767/microsoft-surface-book-20...

Oh, how I would have loved to have been in the meeting where it was decided that the ideal name for a new, thin, light tablet device was the name previously used for a giant, immovable table.

Also the pervasive "Active" brand (late 90's) that was largely shelved with the exception of Active Directory which remains (and is now ascendant).

Examples:

* Active Server Pages

* ActiveScript

* ActiveX

Also ActiveSync.

Active Desktop! Didn't you just love that thing? ~

Was an amazing demo, but a security nightmare. Shudder.

Kind of. KDE seems to be about the only place where that kind of functionality lives on.

And ActiveMovie, which became DirectShow. (which I only remember since Apple lampooned it by internally naming a window used by QuickTime "InactiveMovie")

«Edge» was a terrible name, because in Microsoft-world it already had a different technical meaning in the context of:

  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">

(which has now become unnecessarily misleading).

I think this is why it was chosen in the first place.

I have to say Metro was one of the coolest names they picked and Bing is by far the worst.

For being one syllable, Bing sure is a physically difficult word to pronounce. You have to do weird things with your mouth. Also it means nothing. It has no meaning

I like Bing. Simple, distinctive, not overloaded or misleading or overlapping. Very googleable (ironic I know).

I don't know if it's true, but I was told once that bing means disease in Mandarin.

> I don't know if it's true, but I was told once that bing means disease in Mandarin.

Sort of but not really. It depends on the intonation and even with the right intonation (bing4 / bìng), the sound maps to several other possible words aside from "disease".

I know it's completely subjective and silly on my part. Just can't get past it.

Bing means a pile of rubbish in Scotland.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/bing

Microsoft hired that guy, Andrew Kim, the designer who did the rebrand (if you don't know what I'm talking about: http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/2012/7/3/the-next-micro...), but he's only in the Xbox division.

My opinion: they need to make him branding dictator for a month.

I think the name Visual Studio for Mac is another bad decision like all the rest. They say it's using a lot of code from Visual Studio, but to me that seems like an implementation detail and I don't care. In fact, if it feels like Visual Studio, then they've failed. It should feel like a Mac application.

My first choice would have been to stick with Xamarin Studio. On the other hand, this sounds like a significantly new product, and so if it deserves a new name I would have seized the opportunity to launch something new that's going to get developers attention. Visual Studio for Mac does the opposite. It makes me feel like I know what it is and I'm not that intrigued.

I also would have called Visual Studio Code something else. It's almost like they don't want attention from developers.

I now refer to Visual Studio Code as "vsCode" since it seems to be obvious what it is if you know about it.

> Microsoft is the worst at naming things.

My favourite example has to be Groove.

Groove Music [1] (formerly known as Xbox Music, Zune Music and Microsoft Groove), Groove Music Maker [2] (an unreleased Windows 10 app), Office Groove [3] (a.k.a. SharePoint Workspace) or Groove (now known as OneDrive for Business - the service formerly known as SkyDrive Pro) [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Music

[2] https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/107963/creators-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SharePoint_Workspace

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneDrive#OneDrive_for_Business

I'll do you one better. Before all of that, Groove was a workgroup product, started by the famous Ray Ozzie, which was acqui-hired by Microsoft, and then spiked. It was brilliant. There's been nothing like it since. (Except maaaybe Slack.)

There's also Visual Studio Online, some sort of cloud CI thing.

Even their most successful products have generic and/or confusing names, like windows and word.

I'm pretty sad about this. Most companies let the product orgs own naming after a legal check, but we let Marketing. They're supposed to do market research on names? You would not believe the hurdle that naming causes and how many empty cycles get spent on just coming up with a name. It feels like a battle of attrition.

Program Files

Deleted Items

Sent Items

They are bad at naming EVERYTHING, not just products.

I still would like to meet the person that put the extraneous words "Files" and "Items" in these strings. It's so core and so, so dumb.

Well, it had one good effect. It forced developers like me to start thinking about spaces in path and file names.

The same thing happened to "Outlook" for Mac.

and IE on the Mac.

Or maybe a sort of "Xcode for .NET?"

> "The IDE you love, now on the Mac".

Misleading. Emacs and Vim are installed by default with macOS since the first release of OSX. Xcode is a free download, as Eclipse and NetBeans have been since the dawn of time. I have no idea what they are talking about.

Now, seriously, I move smoothly between Mac and Linux (and did between both and Windows 7 back when 7 was new) with very little trouble. Now that I keep my config on Github (https://github.com/rbanffy/emacs-config) moving between machines and OSs is even smoother.

I don't think I've heard of anyone who "loved" Xcode.

I mean what's not to love? Phantom bugs that disappear after closing and reopening the app, substandard refactoring support (if it even exists for the language being used), commonly occurring crashes, removal of compiler support for the non-latest version of Swift in new Xcode versions, etc.

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