Cross Compatible Development for Macs
April 10, 2018
Cross Compatible Development for Macs
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Community
Overall Satisfaction with Visual Studio IDE
Used solely by myself, it solves the problem of requiring the windows OS for development. I use Mac OS X for any C# development, and with the addition of Mac support for the IDE, this is now a great product to use. After they acquired Xamarin and integrated it into Visual Studio, iOS development is even easier now as well and cross compatible with Android/easy to port to standalone apps or ASP.NET.
- Package management with Nuget is a breeze, without it then development would be a constant pain for setting up projects for fast prototypes.
- The ability to use it as an editor for other tools such as Unity3D, which integrates with it perfectly and allows the IDE to use other libraries for debugging.
- The Mac OS X experience is great and far better than the Windows environment when interacting with the IDE. The Windows install is clunky and the UI is not a joy to navigate, but on OS X it feels familiar and works the way you'd expect. Coming from XCode or other IDEs is easy to get used to.
- Mobile development is good, albeit a pain at first to get setup, but once it's done then everything works acceptably and the simulator manager works most of the time.
- Simulator management can use some work. Oftentimes apps simply won't load or the simulator breaks and requires frequent restarts, especially for Android development.
- iOS provisioning profile management is difficult to get setup initially, this experience could be far more streamlined.
- Native Mac OS X app development is wildly under documented, especially in terms of library usage and what's possible/not supported. Certain MySQL libraries simply weren't working in previous versions, now they are a few years later, but it would have been great to have something in place to show incompatibilities.
- It helps rapidly speed up prototyping, so that results on multiple systems can be shown immediately.
- If you have a Mac development environment, you can do easy C# work for most OS/web technologies. You don't need to add a windows machine.
- It contains a lot of technologies and therefore is almost the complete package, saving a lot of license hassle if you need different tools to make apps.
Xamarin was a great tool, however after it merged with Visual Studio, everything is finally in the same place. XCode is great for Swift/Objective C development, however that's not exactly cross compatible. Visual Studio has a lot of different environment targets and is frequently updated unlike XCode.