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Microsoft has a bunch of important improvements slated for its Visual Studio 2019 for Mac whenever it is released, and the company has laid out a detailed roadmap to advise users of what is to come.
Visual Studio 2017 for Mac was released in 2017 and has since received a wide range of new features, including support for NET Core 2; richer language services for editing JavaScript, TypeScript and Razor pages; Azure Functions; and the ability to deploy and debug .NET Core apps inside Docker containers.
But that was just the start of a pattern of improvements, wrote Unni Ravindranathan, principal program manager and lead of the Visual Studio for Mac program management team, in a recent post on The Visual Studio Blog.
“Our aspiration with Visual Studio for Mac is to bring the Visual Studio experiences that developers have come to know and love on Windows to the MacOS and to provide an excellent IDE experience for all .NET cross-platform developers,” he wrote.
When Visual Studio 2017 for Mac was released, it was an IDE primarily focused on mobile application development using Xamarin, wrote Ravindranathan. Now that version has been refined and expanded to also include support for all major .NET cross-platform workloads including Xamarin, Unity and .NET Core.
There have been other improvements as well, but the company is now ready to start talking about the next version, Visual Studio 2019 for Mac, even as it continues to plan updates for the 2017 version through early 2019, he wrote.
The plans for Visual Studio 2019 for Mac are laid out in a product roadmap that describes many of the feedback themes that were raised by users who asked for certain features, improvements and capabilities in an upcoming version.
“Improving the typing performance and reliability is our single biggest focus area for Visual Studio 2019 for Mac,” wrote Ravindranathan. “We plan to replace most of the internals of the Visual Studio for Mac editor with those from Visual Studio. Combined with the work to improve our integration of various language services, our aspiration is to bring similar levels of editor productivity from Visual Studio to Visual Studio for Mac.”
At the same time, Microsoft will work to address a top request
from users to add Right-To-Left (RTL) support to the application’s built-in editor to enable right-to-left languages to display text correctly on a screen, he wrote.
Also highly requested by Mac users has been support for Team Foundation Server, with both Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) and Git as the source control mechanisms, he wrote. “While we currently have an extension available for Visual Studio 2017 for Mac that adds support for TFVC, we will integrate it into the core of the source control experience in Visual Studio 2019 for Mac.”
For users seeking increased productivity, the C# editor in Visual Studio for Mac will be built on top of the same Roslyn back end used by Visual Studio on Windows, which will bring many performance improvements, he wrote. “In the Visual Studio 2019 for Mac release, we’ll also dramatically reduce the time it takes you to connect to your source code and begin working with it in the product, by introducing a streamlined ‘open from version control’ dialog with a brand-new Git-focused workflow.”
Among the updates still to come for the existing Visual Studio 2017 for Mac application are support for
.NET Core 2.2 and
the ability to
publish ASP.NET Core projects to a folder
. Support for Azure Functions 2.0 will also be added, as well as an update to the New Functions Project dialog to support updating to the latest version of Azure Functions tooling and templates.
In Visual Studio 2019 for Mac, support for
.NET Core 3.0
will be added when it becomes available in 2019, as well as additional ASP.NET Core templates and template options and improved Azure publishing options. Also to come are improvements to the application’s language services supporting ASP.NET Core development including Razor, JavaScript and TypeScript.
Xamarin support updates will include continuing improvements for Android build performance and improvements in the reliability of deploying iOS and Android apps, including making it easier to acquire Android emulators from within the Visual Studio for Mac IDE. Updates will also come to the Xamarin.Forms Previewer and the Xamarin.Android Designer as well as the XAML language service for Xamarin Forms, wrote Ravindranathan.
“By supporting installation of both versions of the product side-by-side, we’ll make it easy for you to try out the Visual Studio 2019 for Mac preview releases while we are still also working on the stable Visual Studio 2017 for Mac releases in parallel,” he wrote.
A preview version is not yet ready but will be announced in the future. Microsoft is continuing to accept feedback from users on the existing product through the Developer Community website.