Thanks to Microsoft’s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) across Windows and Mac, which enables the developers to build for the cloud, mobile, and the web.
As per 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.”
A big milestone has been achieved by Microsoft by bringing its IDE to macOS, as some time back, it offered its tools on Windows; thereby locking in developers. This was gradually expanded over the years with its cross-platform code editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux when Microsoft launched Visual Studio Code in 2015 to Visual Studio for Mac which arrived in preview in November 2016. This announcement at Microsoft Build 2017 is simply incredible.
Microsoft plans to eventually sunset Xamarin Studio and it is inheriting from the mobile-centric Xamarin Studio and from Visual Studio for Windows. To support native Android, iOS, and Mac development via Xamarin, and server development via .NET Core with Azure integration, Visual Studio for Mac comes into play.
Visual Studio Snapshot Debugger is introduced which offers developers insight into cloud production code behavior at the time of an exception without writing extensive logging statements or exception handling code.
In order to deliver the usual bug fixes along with new functionality, Visual Studio 2017 has been updated to version 15.2. .NET Core 2.0 preview support, Live Unit Testing for .NET Core projects, more C++ standard conformance, enhancement in continuous delivery for ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core projects targeting an Azure App Services, and improvements in container development tools are some of the new functionalities introduced.
It is .NET Core 2.0 preview, which got little mention as it allows the developers to use .NET Standard 2.0’s expanded set of uniform APIs to write once and run on multiple .NET runtimes (.NET Framework, .NET Core, Xamarin, and Universal Windows Platform) whereas ASP.NET Core 2.0 preview proves to be significant as new capabilities consist of Razor Pages, a lightweight syntax for combining server code with HTML and much more.