Preview 9 of Visual Studio for Mac is out as GA approaches

Microsoft has made available an updated preview of Visual Studio 2022 for Mac, addressing what it described as the "top reported issues" in preview 9. The VS team's move could be seen as an example to the Windows crew, following an "Ask Microsoft Anything" in which Microsoft didn't seem convinced by calls to "Bring back the …

[bigtimehustler]

Who actually is the intended user of this? If you are developing for the windows ecosystem then surely you have a windows OS. If you are not, why would you pick this tool on a mac rather than any other available one?

[karlkarl]

It is so then Microsoft can claim their actual Visual Studio product is completely cross platform, attracting more users on Windows thinking they can "just hop onto different platforms" when inevitably needed.

What Microsoft doesn't seem to say is that VS, VS Mac and VS Code are completely different IDEs and have almost no compatibility or inoperability between one another. Even the trivial make/nmake utility is incompatible.

Whilst it is a bit of a "con", it isn't so much of an issue when most guys use CMake now anyway. That does much of the heavy lifting thankfully.

[Anonymous Coward]

VS and VS Mac are compatible. The same .net project on windows will open fine on Mac and the other way round.

VS Code on the other hand can just fuck off.

[karlkarl]

No they aren't. Now try building a C++ project.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I’m not a time traveller from the 90s so have no need to touch C++. The majority of vs use is .net.

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange questions and answers so far, my guess it's about the product.

I have untold hours behind vim. Thousands behind emacs. Around 5000 behind CodeBlocks. Maybe 2000 behind eclipse. Maybe 500 behind other 1-off editors like VSCode. A few.other IDEs along the journey. Out of all those hours, the several thousand I put behind MS Studio was the smoothest, at least as far as C++ went (debugging init used to be legendary).

[karlkarl]

Most of .NET is just a wrapper around C and C++ libs. *Someone* has to develop that stuff ;)

[Spanky_McPherson]

Not really for C++ programmers.

Visual Studio for Mac is the evolution of the original Xamarin Studio, which was very much a C# IDE rather an a C++ IDE.

If you're a Windows C++ programmer, no need to go anywhere near this.

[karlkarl]

I do agree though. VS Code doesn't need to exist. Purely a "brand" exercise.