Version 3.0 is installed automatically, and you can create ASP.NET Core apps, but when you go to create a mobile app, the option to create an ASP.NET Core API back end is disabled because it 'requires an ASP.NET Core installation'. All straightforward, but there is a puzzle about. The installer pulls down the Android SDK for you, but you have to install Xcode separately. Xamarin Forms can also target Windows UWP (Universal Windows Platform) and, in preview, macOS.Ī cross-platform Xamarin Forms app running on iOS and Android Xamarin.Mac is for Cocoa applications and uses a similar model to Xamarin.iOS. You design the user interface with XAML and build for your chosen target platforms. Xamarin Forms is a cross-platform GUI framework. Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android let you write non-visual code in C# while using native tools to build the UI, Xcode for iOS or a built-in Android designer for Android. The majority of Xamarin developers code applications for iOS and Android, and there are two different approaches to this. VS Mac is primarily for Xamarin development. It is still the case that Visual Studio for the Mac is a very different thing from Visual Studio for Windows. NET Core, though Mono has not been completely replaced. NET Core, which has allowed code sharing between Mono and.

This goes alongside the development of the cross-platform. Although lightweight in comparison to Visual Studio, VS Code straddles the boundary between an editor and an IDE, with debugging support and a rich range of extensions.įollowing the acquisition, Microsoft has been working on sharing some of its Visual Studio for Windows technology with the Mac version. VS Code was first previewed in 2015 and has been a remarkable success, now ranking as the top development environment on the popular coding Q&A site StackOverflow by a huge margin. Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a cross-platform editor built with the Electron framework, using Node.js and the Chromium browser engine Blink. You can still get MonoDevelop for Mac, Windows and Linux, though the Mac download is now Visual Studio for Mac, and on Windows you have to build it from source. When Microsoft acquired Xamarin in 2016, Xamarin Studio became a Mac-only IDE and was renamed Visual Studio for Mac. Xamarin adapted MonoDevelop to become Xamarin Studio. Mono had its own IDE, called MonoDevelop, which unlike Visual Studio was originally written entirely in C#. Xamarin evolved from the open-source Mono framework, an implementation of.

Visual studio code vs visual studio mac