After Microsoft today the general availability of, many developers on forum sites questioned if it's really the same IDE that Windows users have known and loved for years, or a refactored, rebadged and rebranded version of - and no less than Xamarin chief Miguel de Icaza himself weighed in with some answers. De Icaza co-founded Xamarin, which was by Microsoft last year to bring in-house its popular functionality, including the cross-platform ability to create native mobile apps for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows apps with C# code. At its Connect; 2016 conference last November, Microsoft a preview of Visual Studio for Mac, saying it was 'evolving the mobile-centric Xamarin Studio IDE into a true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for.NET and C#, and bringing the Visual Studio development experience to the Mac.' Even though Microsoft was clear about the Xamarin Studio-based origins of the Mac-based IDE, many developers on Hacker News and the Reddit programming section questioned the inclusion of the Visual Studio brand with the new product. And, showing just how much Microsoft is listening to its developer community, de Icaza and another exec chimed in with clarifying comments. One typical reader comment on said: '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.' ' VS for Mac Product Manager Rajen Kishna replied: '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.' Click on image for larger view. Scott Guthrie at Build 2017 (source: Microsoft) de Icaza also chimed in: 'I would like to add that we have been reusing a lot of the existing code from Visual Studio in Visual Studio for Mac.'
Another reader asked: 'Is this more than just Xamarin? I'm sorry - I tried last time and that was the impression I got. I know it says it has asp.net core but can I truly build.net Web services based apps now without parallels?' And again, both Kishna and de Icaza answered.
Kishna said: 'It definitely is more than Xamarin, we brought in support for creating Web apps and services with.NET Core/ASP.NET Core, game development with Unity and C#, and cloud integration with publishing your Web apps/services to Azure directly from within the IDE. We're also announcing some preview features coming very soon, including Docker and Azure Functions support, as well as targeting IoT devices like Android Things.' De Icaza said: 'Yes, you can build.NET Core service apps. You can create new projects, debug them and bonus points - deploy directly to Azure.'
Dominic Nahous, Senior PM Manager, Visual Studio for Mac @VisualStudio. Dominic works as a PM manager on Visual Studio for Mac. His team focuses on ensuring a delightful experience for developers using a Mac to build apps. Since Visual Studio 97 released, Visual Studio mainly supported Windows, though Visual Studio Code was available for Linux and Mac, it As Expected, Visual Studio for Mac supports source control which is an essential for any development team. You can use any form of Git Repositories.
Another reader asked: 'Isn't this just MonoDevelop? Or have Microsoft added secret sauce to the mix?'
, according to, was the open source IDE on which Xamarin Studio was based. Click on image for larger view. Visual Studio for Mac (source: Microsoft) de Icaza replied to that reader: 'Good guess. It is based on the MonoDevelop core with many new extensions to support new workloads (.NET Core, Azure Deployment, Unity development). 'Additionally, over the past year we have replaced started to replace the internals of MonoDevelop with code from Visual Studio that we have been open sourcing.
'In addition to what has been open sourced and integrated so far, we have a strong pipeline of additional features and capabilities that will bring even more Visual Studio code into the IDE. 'We are roughly on a 6-8 weeks release cadence that aligns with the Visual Studio release cadence, so you will see various subsystems get new capabilities continuously from this point on.' A second Hacker News reader inquired about MonoDevelop, asking: 'Has Microsoft announced whether MonoDevelop will still be open source? De Icaza replied: '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.'
Another reader asked about a roadmap for Xamarin Studio. De Icaza replied: 'Xamarin Studio users will be upgraded to Visual Studio for Mac;-)' Another reader asked about doing the same thing for Linux. The question read: 'If they're willing to deliver a port of Xamarin/MonoDevelop to Mac and call it VS, it's at least funny that they won't do that for Linux. There is no actual need for that, but since they're refactoring Xamarin.' De Icaza replied: 'We would like more people to speak up about this. We need your votes, your voices to make the case that we should release all this goodness on Linux. Little known fact: some of the engineers on the Visual Studio for Mac team are still developing it in Linux itself.
So it already works there. At this point it is a matter of hearing your voices. Speak up often:-)' The place to speak up, de Icaza said, is Microsoft's site for Visual Studio, where it collects feedback and feature requests from developers. Over at, there wasn't as active of a discussion - and neither Kishna nor de Icaza made an appearance - but some of the same concerns were voiced. One comment said: 'Super misleading. This is not the proper Visual Studio.'
Another Reddit comment said: 'This isn't just differences, this is MonoDevelop rebranded. It's totally different software with the same name.' Another Reddit reader also asked about Linux perhaps being next in line for the VS treatment. On the User Voice site, a request for ' had garnered 257 votes and 11 comments as of press time. One reader said: 'As someone who develops often on Windows with VS, it'd be nice to have this tool on Linux. Seriously, support as many project types as you possibly can, not just.Net Core.
Even if we can't get Win32, being able to create desktop GUI apps on Linux using VS for Linux and Mono/.Net would be pretty great.' In his Hacker News replies, de Icaza said he would be providing more details on Visual Studio for Mac during a presentation he's giving later today at Microsoft's Build 2017 conference, where the general availability announcement was made. More on can be found on our sister site, Visual Studio Magazine.
I have Enterprise license through VS subscription. However, the license verification process in VS for Mac failed to authenticate me and update the license. It appears that the license check process doesn't use system proxy setup and failed after the login process, which itself was actually successful. Based on captured traffic, after successful login at login.live.com, the process tries to do a DNS lookup for and then try to directly connect to the IP address returned and thus was blocked by the proxy which forbids direct IP connection. This prevents the license from being refreshed. Please update the license renew process to connect directly to the desired host by name, which is supported by the proxy as in the case of login.live.com. Hi, is there any update on this?
We have the same problem, license verification does not work both on my local MacBook as well as on our MacMini CI environment. We are behind a corporate proxy.
Thank you for your feedback, I'm helping look into what may be going on here. Please accept my apologies for our delay in responding! For us to investigate this further, could you please provide the following logs and information? First, close Visual Studio for Mac. From a Terminal window, run rm -Rf /.ServiceHub/logs rm -Rf /Library/Logs/VisualStudio launchctl setenv SERVICEHUBTRACELEVEL info Then launch VS for Mac and reproduce your issue. Then, please attach the following:.
In the IDE zip up and attach logs by using the Help Open Log Directory menu to (please first clear logs, reproduce issue, then attach resulting logs). In the Finder, choose the Go Go to Folder.
Menu and go to the path '/.ServiceHub/logs'. Zip the results and attach them. Copy full version details from Visual Studio About Visual Studio Show Details Copy Information button To attach the files you can add a new comment here, and click the arrow next to 'Viewable by all users' to change it to 'Viewable by moderators' to keep your files private. Thanks and I look forward to hearing from you! Thank you to the original poster for sharing your log files and working with us in a remote sharing session yesterday! For anyone else tracking this issue, I'd appreciate your help in tracking down other repro cases. Please take the following steps to privately share logs with us, thank you!
First, close Visual Studio for Mac. From a Terminal window, runrm -Rf /.ServiceHub/logs rm -Rf /Library/Logs/VisualStudio launchctl setenv SERVICEHUBTRACELEVEL all Then launch VS for Mac and reproduce your issue. Then, please attach the following:.
In the IDE zip up and attach logs by using the Help Open Log Directory menu to (please first clear logs, reproduce issue, then attach resulting logs). In the Finder, choose the Go Go to Folder. Menu and go to the path '/.ServiceHub/logs'. Zip the results and attach them. Copy full version details from Visual Studio About Visual Studio Show Details Copy Information button To attach the files you can add a new comment here, and click the arrow next to 'Viewable by all users' to change it to 'Viewable by moderators' to keep your files private.