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Comment by migueldeicaza | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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

> 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.

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.

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 ;-)

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