“Microsoft has announced it’s launching its primary coding interface, Visual Studio, on Mac computers,” James Vincent reports for The Verge. “It’s been a long time coming, and is a big shakeup for the company, which has previously preferred to lock developers into its platform by keeping coding tools Windows-only.”
“By making Visual Studio cross-platform, Microsoft will be hoping to retain professional users that want to work on their projects from any operating system they like,” Vincent reports. “The software is based on app development platform Xamarin Studio, and the change could encourage Mac and iOS developers to make more apps for Windows, as these users will no longer have to buy a Windows computer or set up a virtual machine to access Visual Studio.”
Vincent reports, “A preview of the software will be unveiled at Microsoft’s Connect developer event later this week.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The reverberations from Apple’s destruction of the Windows hegemony continue unabated.
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Already there — it’s called Xojo.com!
This would do more to make MacOS a professional development platform. Visual Studio is a robust IDE that’s used in a lot of collaborative environments, which probably results in a lot of Mac users taking advantage of Boot Camp and installing Windows on their machines. Now there’s one less reason to do so.
Rationality from MS. Who’da thunk it…?
Its really a re-badge of Xamarian Studio on MacOS.
Its welcome news and they hinted about going this direction when they first acquired Xamarin.
Cool.
This a stupid idea. The world is full of the now!
If “the now” works, go with it.
That’s called “common sense” as opposed to “change for the sake of change”
Now if Apple only had Pro hardware…
Looks like games are the only reason to go Windows 🙂
(OK, I’m kidding. Although I don’t use one, the lack of upgrades for Mac Pros for so long is pretty shocking. It’s not like Apple doesn’t have money to fully staff the Mac Pro dept. … or however they organise themselves internally over at 1 Infinite Loop).
Apple has morphed into Microsoft of the early 2000’s- unable to deliver the goods, unable to deliver them polished, tone deaf to the needs of users, clueless about the future and happy to wallow in their own PR.
Microsoft has pivoted since the departure of Ballmer and is quite a different company. Amazon is on a roll and Jeff Bezos seem to be health and full of fire in the belly. Google is wandering in the Wilderness and throwing money at the wall hoping something will stick. And Apple has went from a company dependent upon the Mac into a company dependent upon the iPhone.
The worldwide market for high margin smartphones is pretty fully exhausted. Apple might be able to grow by converting high income Android customers, but the days of go-go growth are for the most part over. Growth at Apple will have to be from services, the Mac, the iPad, the Apple TV and whatever other product lines it enters.
One more choice for developers!