Later this week, Microsoft will be hosting its Connect() developer conference in New York City, but one of its major announcements has already been revealed, thanks to an apparent slip-up by the company.
A blog post appeared on the MSDN site earlier today titled "Visual Studio for Mac - Introducing Visual Studio for Mac"; the post was quickly removed, although a cached version is available to view here, which suggests that the announcement went out a bit earlier than intended.
"At its heart," Microsoft explained, "Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio... Its UX is inspired by Visual Studio, yet designed to look and feel like a native citizen of macOS."
It also describes the new offering as "evolving the mobile-centric Xamarin Studio IDE into a true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for .NET and C#", adding:
Below the surface, Visual Studio for Mac also has a lot in common with its siblings in the Visual Studio family. Its IntelliSense and refactoring use the Roslyn Compiler Platform; 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.
Microsoft acquired Xamarin earlier this year, strengthening its commitment to cross-platform software development, so it"s no great shock to see the company putting that acquisition to greater use with new integration of those tools into its portfolio, and by extending its popular Visual Studio offering on Apple computers. Microsoft had already made its Visual Studio Code editor available for Macs last year.
Source: MSDN (cached) via TechCrunch