Microsoft has officially released the new Visual Studio for Mac today. It had confirmed several months ago that a new version of the development suite was in the pipeline and had even released a preview version which developers have been using for quite a few months now. The company announced at its BUILD conference in Seattle today that the new Visual Studio for Mac is now ready and has thus been released for Apple’s computers.
Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac can be used to create applications for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and Android. It can even be used to build apps for the web and the cloud. Some great new features have been added to the development suite, including but not limited to multi-platform app templates and Git integration.
Visual Studio for Mac relies on .NET Core and Xamarin which enables it to allow developers to use the suite for developing multi-platform applications. Developers will thus be able to take full advantage of all the capabilities that it offers, including the ability to develop games based on Unity, which is one of the most widely used commercial game platforms.
Visual Studio had been a Windows-only app until November last year when Microsoft released the first preview of Visual Studio for Mac.
Interested developers can now get all of the core Visual Studio downloads for free from Microsoft. However, a paid subscription may be required for professional use.