Visual Studio for Mac Supersedes Xamarin Studio

Visual Studio (VS) for Mac, the first non-Windows offering of the VS integrated development environment (IDE), became generally available in May 2017. VS for Mac delivers tools for building Android, iOS, and macOS applications and Web sites and services for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It primarily supports Microsoft technologies such as the Xamarin platform, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Azure, and the C# and F# programming languages. VS for Mac could help organizations with a need or desire to use Mac hardware, but it provides a modest subset of the languages, frameworks, platforms, and tools supported by VS for Windows.

Primarily for Mobile Apps, Back-end Services

VS for Mac is an evolution of Xamarin Studio, an IDE offered on the Mac by Xamarin for several years before the company was acquired by Microsoft in early 2016. Xamarin’s focus was cross-platform mobile application development tools, and the company created technology that allows developers to use the C# and F# programming languages and the .NET Framework to write applications that work across Android, iOS, and Windows platforms. The technology was supported in VS for Windows prior to the acquisition, but Xamarin Studio was offered for developers using Mac workstations. Xamarin Studio will not receive further updates as VS for Mac takes its place.