Visual Studio - Customizing Visual Studio for Mac By Alessandro Del Sole| December 2017 Visual Studio for Mac is a fully featured native development environment designed for building cross-platform applications with Xamarin and.NET Core on macOS.

Develop apps and games for iOS, Android,
and web using .NET

Code in C#, F#, Razor, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, XAML, and XML

With the power of Roslyn, Visual Studio for Mac brings IntelliSense to your fingertips. IntelliSense describes APIs as you type and uses auto-completion to increase the speed and accuracy of how you write code.

Quick Info tool tips let you inspect API definitions, squiggly lines in the editor highlight issues, in real time as you type.

Use the Visual Studio debugger to quickly find and fix bugs across languages.

The Visual Studio for Mac debugger lets you step inside your code by setting Breakpoints, Step Over statements, Step Into and Out of functions, and inspect the current state of the code stack through powerful visualizations.

As your project grows, chances are, you’ll find yourself restructuring and refactoring code that you or someone else wrote earlier. That’s a whole lot easier when Visual Studio for Mac takes care of the heavy lifting for you.

The Visual Studio for Mac editor supports powerful built-in refactoring options such as Extract Method and Rename, accessible via the Quick Actions menu.

Manage your code in Git or SVN repos hosted by any provider, including GitHub and Azure DevOps. Review diffs, stage files, and make commits from inside Visual Studio for Mac.

Choose the development environment that is right for you. With Visual Studio on both macOS and Windows, you can share your C# and F# projects seamlessly with your team using either OS.

Create cross-platform apps targeting Android and iOS using Xamarin

Build, manage, and deploy cloud apps that scale to Azure

Create and debug cross platform games and 3D real time applications with Unity

Customers using Xamarin with Visual Studio for Mac

Launch a professional environment tailored to the Mac, free for most non-enterprise users

Visual Studio for Mac is a .NET integrated development environment on the Mac that can be used to edit, debug, and build code and then publish an app. In addition to expected features, such as a standard editor and debugger, Visual Studio for Mac includes compilers, code completion tools, graphical designers, and source control to ease the software development process.

Visual Studio for Mac supports many of the same file types as its Windows counterpart, such as .csproj, .fsproj, or .sln files, and supports features such as EditorConfig, meaning that you can use the IDE that works best for you.Creating, opening, and developing an app will be a familiar experience for anyone who has previously used Visual Studio on Windows. In addition, Visual Studio for Mac employs many of the powerful tools that make its Windows counterpart such a powerful IDE. The Roslyn Compiler Platform is used for refactoring and IntelliSense. Its project system and build engine use MSBuild, and its source editor supports TextMate bundles. It uses the same debugger engines for Xamarin and .NET Core apps, and the same designers for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android.

What can I do in Visual Studio for Mac

Visual Studio for Mac supports the following types of development:

• ASP.NET Core web applications with C#, F#, and support for Razor pages, JavaScript and TypeScript
• .NET Core console applications with C# or F#
• Cross-platform Unity games and applications with C#
• Android, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS applications in Xamarin with C# or F# and XAML
• Cocoa desktop apps in C# or F#

This article explores various sections of Visual Studio for Mac, providing a look at some of the features that make it a powerful tool for creating these applications.

IDE tour

Visual Studio for Mac is organized into several sections for managing application files and settings, creating application code, and debugging.

Start window

When you start Visual Studio 2019 for Mac, new users will see a sign-in window. Sign-in with your Microsoft account to activate a paid license (if you have one) or link to Azure subscriptions. You can press Skip and sign in later via the Visual Studio > Sign in menu item:

Signed-in users will see the new start window, which shows a list of recent projects, and buttons to open an existing project or create a new one:

Solutions and projects

The following image shows Visual Studio for Mac with an application loaded:

The following sections provide an overview of the major areas in Visual Studio for Mac.

Solution pad

The Solution Pad organizes the project(s) in a solution:

This is where files for the source code, resources, user interface, and dependencies are organized into platform-specific Projects.

For more information on using Projects and Solutions in Visual Studio for Mac, see the Projects and Solutions article.

Assembly references

Assembly references for each project are available under the References folder:

Additional references are added using the Edit References dialog, which is displayed by double-clicking on the References folder, or by selecting Edit References on its context menu actions:

For more information on using References in Visual Studio for Mac, see the Managing References in a Project article.

Dependencies / packages

All external dependencies used in your app are stored in the Dependencies or Packages folder, depending on whether you are in a .Net Core or Xamarin.iOS/Xamarin.Android project. These are usually provided in the form of a NuGet.

NuGet is the most popular package manager for .NET development. With Visual Studio's NuGet support, you can easily search for and add packages to your project to application.

To add a dependency to your application, right-click on the Dependencies / Packages folder, and select Add Packages:

Information on using a NuGet package in an application can be found in the Including a NuGet project in your project article.

Refactoring

Visual Studio for Mac provides two useful ways to refactor your code: Context Actions, and Source Analysis. You can read more about them in the Refactoring article.

Debugging

Visual Studio for Mac has a native debugger allowing debugging support for Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Mac, and Xamarin.Android applications. Visual Studio for Mac uses the Mono Soft Debugger, which is implemented into the Mono runtime, allowing the IDE to debug managed code across all platforms. For additional information on debugging, visit the Debugging article.

The debugger contains rich visualizers for special types such as strings, colors, URLs, as well as sizes, co-ordinates, and bézier curves.

For more information on the debugger's data visualizations, visit the Data Visualizations article.

Version control

Visual Studio for Mac integrates with Git and Subversion source control systems. Projects under source control are denoted with the branch listed next to the Solution name:

Files with uncommitted changes have an annotation on their icons in the Solution Pane, as illustrated in the following image:

For more information on using version control in Visual Studio, see the Version Control article.

Visual Studio For Mac 2010 Thunderbolt

Next steps

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See also