In a month of many surprises, Microsoft has one more for developers everywhere: It’s finally bringing Visual Studio to Mac.
A preview version of Visual Studio for Mac will debut at this week’s Connect conference, according to a blog post the company published and later deleted. (Thanks to our friends over at Engadget for saving a cached version.)
Based on Xamarin technology, the Mac version of Microsoft’s integrated development environment is primarily designed to support development for iOS, Android and Mac, as well as server development via .NET Core. It’s powered by C# and includes F# support.
With Mac and Windows versions of Visual Studio available, developers working on different platforms will be able to collaborate on projects without converting files. Microsoft is also promising a companion Mac version of Visual Studio Code, the streamlined version of VS for quickly editing source code.
The move to make Microsoft’s integrated development environment available to Mac users is the latest sign of the company’s new platform-agnostic, cloud-focused strategy.
“This is an exciting development, evolving the mobile-centric Xamarin Studio IDE into a true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for .NET and C#, and bringing the Visual Studio development experience to the Mac,” reads the blog post.
Microsoft does note that Visual Studio for Mac is a new product and not all Visual Studio project types will be supported in the preview version.