Microsoft held the keynote for its Connect() developer conference today, where it announced the next version of its integrated development environment (IDE), Visual Studio 2017. The company is also offering a release candidate, which you can grab from VisualStudio.com.
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The company’s latest IDE has a heavy focus on mobile cross-platform development, coming with an iOS Simulator, a feature that used to be exclusive to developing on a Mac.
In addition, as accidentally spoiled earlier this week, Visual Studio for the Mac has also been released. Technically, it’s Xamarin, but Microsoft is rebranding it as Visual Studio.
Being able to uninstall the whole thing in one go, rather than the nearly twenty individual components is going to be a major convenience.
So what API is Microsoft using these days to do the GUI stuff across platforms? As I recall, first they had Windows Forms on .NET, then WPF/Silverlight, and then I think WinRT in Windows 8, and then I kind of lost track. lol
GUI Stuff across platforms didn’t exist in the MS-past unless you count WebForms (HTML). Now it uses XAML by default for apps, but of course most GUI’s are now HTML/CSS/JavaScript for which the default GUI is now “Do it yourself MVC”
The Xamarin Studio UI is GtkSharp. This new version I haven’t looked at yet (downloaded the preview last night, but didn’t get round to installing it.)
If you are developing C# based software on the Mac, the general UI suggested these days is MonoMac or Xamarin.Mac (which is derived/forked from MonoMac.) I imagibe the UI might be re-written in one of those two frameworks, but there’s also a possibility they’ll use Xamarin.Forms as there’s a port to Mac ongoing. I can’t imagine it will stay as GtkSharp, as they is not a great fix for Mac really – it only just worked initially, and was still flaky even recently.
Well, technically it is Monodevelop, which, technically is a fork of Sharpdevelop with the UI kit replaced with Gtk, as Sharpdevelop used Winforms (then later WPF) and Monodevelop was originally meant to target LINUX.
Also – what Xamarin *did* to Monodevelop was horrible. They removed Monodevelop from the web, making it almost impossible to find a binary for it. They rebranded it Xamarin, and tied it deeply to their paid for frameworks. Even the links to “Monodevelop” on the Mono website simply linked to the Xamarin Studio installer. Sure, source still existed – but it was notoriously difficult to build. I think a very old version was still available with Unity, but it didn’t do regular C# development.
I, as a developer who uses Microsoft Technologies, am happy it was re-branded to Visual Studio because that removed another part of the Xamarin legacy.
Edited 2016-11-17 11:33 UTC
Hmm, so they are apparently renaming “Run to Cursor” to “Run To Click” and calling it a brand new feature.
Depends on how it works. Does it still work in the same way, or will it literally run till you click on a source file then break on that line? I’ve not seen any info about the feature.