So, now that Visual Studio is available for the Mac does anyone know if its possible to compile/debug NETMF from there?
@ ianlee74
The old name was Xamarin Studio… or very old Mono Develop
You can develop Xamarin Apps, Dotnet Core…8)
I tried installing it, to take it for a spin, as my primary machine is a Mac. It sucks! Wait for a while for it to mature. Installation is a nightmare and the underlying libraries and options are not mature. (which makes sense!).
I installed it also. Copied a .NET Core application (in multiple assemblies) and had to setup a completely new solution and projects. It appears that the Mac is not using the latest .NET Core project file format. I could not get the code to compile using .NET Core.
VS for Mac Preview = Teaser in this case.
@ ianlee74 - No.
And I would not expect to see NETMF or C++ support there any time soon.
Currently, VS for Mac (which, as others have noted, is simply an evolution of Xamarin Studio) only supports Xamarin projects, and .NET Core (looks like primarily for building ASP.NET Core back-end services).
While that’s cool for those workloads, it’s no more “Visual Studio” than is Visual Studio Code. To be clear, I’m a fan of Code, and it’s an awesome tool in its own right. VS for Mac will certainly have its uses, but I’m not too keen on the overloading of the “Visual Studio” brand, as it’s too easy to get people confused by the marketing.
We already have VS2017 working with TinyCLR (NETMF). I wonder how much work is it to make it work on a Mac :think:
@ devhammer - thanks for the insight. Hopefully, this is just the start of a truly cross-platform Visual Studio.
Again, I don’t know that I’d hold my breath for that. Porting full VS to Mac would be a monumental undertaking, with little benefit.
Yea… But, a couple years ago when I was calling for a multi platform Microsoft compiler you were saying the same thing but now its begun. Microsoft’s real interest these days is Azure. If they have to port VS to Mac to get more folks on Azure then I think they’ll consider it worth the effort. Besides, why would it be a monumental effort? If .NET Core is the future and it runs cross platform then all they really have to do is port VS to .NET Core, right? 
@ ianlee74 -
That is my read on it from watching connect(). It’s dn core going forward. I am with you, and I suspect they will make it happen.
I would never say never. But the idea that we’ll see all of Visual Studio ported to Mac just doesn’t make sense to me. Why would you port Windows Forms, WPF, etc. to Mac, when those technologies are Windows-specific? I see little upside to that effort.
Renaming Xamarin Studio to “Visual Studio for Mac” and adding support for ASP.NET Core makes sense, because the majority of the code already existed, and has no dependencies on the Win32 APIs. Not so with full Visual Studio.
The larger question is whether .NET Core (and/or .NET Standard) represent the future of Visual Studio and .NET. Eventually, I think the answer is yes, but there’s still a whole lot of Win32 in the wild, and for now, .NET core doesn’t cover the full API set of the full .NET Framework, much less providing any coverage for Win32 APIs. So porting full Visual Studio to Mac would require either rewriting major portions of the application, or providing a compatibility/emulation layer for the underlying APIs that are missing on Mac.
Good point. I almost forgot some people still write desktop apps. And since desktop apps aren’t really a big driver for Azure I could still see a VS SKU for Mac released that does everything except desktop apps. Of course, I would expect that Xamarin Studio & VS will eventually be a single development environment. But, I haven’t really messed with Xamarin Studio and have little insight into their differences. That’s just what typically happens when Microsoft purchases a dev technology.