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> Once the wheels fall off Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft recommends accessing its IDE through Windows in a machine virtual on the Mac or in the cloud. Hmm t

by tailspin2019 3y ago

> Once the wheels fall off Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft recommends accessing its IDE through Windows in a machine virtual on the Mac or in the cloud. Hmm that sounds appealing /s JetBrains Rider is the only viable alternative now. VS Code on Mac may catch up, but I dislike it as my primary IDE for C# (great for lots of other things though). Overall I think this is a mistake on Microsoft’s part unless they are also planning a significant move to pull out of cross-platform app development too (ie iOS/Android + desktop). They are crippling the app development story for .NET on Mac now IMHO, and it wasn’t great to start with. This weakens an already quite fragile ecosystem for creating Mac/iOS apps with .NET. This is on top of MAUI being launched before it was ready and Xamarin being discontinued much too quickly. This seems like a strong indicator to me that I should not pick .NET for greenfield cross-platform (mobile) app projects going forwards.

redhale 3y ago
This new (preview) official "C# Dev Kit" VS Code plugin seems relevant, should help close the gap: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotnettools.csdevkit https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne... But also Rider is awesome, and I recommend it to everyone.
NikkiA 3y ago
> Hmm that sounds appealing /s I mean, it's better than 'buy a mac and pay us $100/year'.
SoftTalker 3y ago
> They are crippling the app development story for .NET on Mac Honestly how many .NET developers ever used a Mac as their work machine? I have to think it's a tiny percentage.
- clarky07 3y ago
  all the ones using it for ios development. i don't know how many did, but this really sucks for those of us that have been using xamarin / .net for ios
- saberience 3y ago
  A lot! Last company I worked for (40B+ valuation) every developer used a Mac laptop and we were a .net shop. I imagine this is the same at many other companies using .net.
- archon 3y ago
  I'm one of that tiny percentage, but all of my development is done by remoting into a cloud Windows VM. I tried directly coding on the Mac when I first got it, but quickly gave up on that. (I hate Rider, which seems to put me in minority as far as most .Net devs go.)
  - generichuman 3y ago
    What sort of work are you doing that made you give up on C# on mac? Backend or games? I haven't really tried to write serious C# code on macOS, but I did write some CLI tools, which was not bad. VSCode debugging works great too. Obviously .NET is not supported as well as it should anywhere except Windows, but it seems to be getting better.
    - archon 3y ago
      Backend with a lot of existing code that's still in .Net Framework using tech like WCF and Windows Services. I could get away with doing dev directly on the Mac if I was _only_ working in .Net Core on our newer applications and if I was willing to use Rider. Neither of which are true.
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  For old school .NET Framework, not so much. For .NET 5+… probably more than you think.
  - throw__away7391 3y ago
    Yeah, I agree. I see a ton of Rider screenshots on projects, videos, presentation slides these days and I imagine those are almost all Mac users.
  - techdragon 3y ago
    As a long term python dev I was starting to warm up to c# and considering it for some upcoming projects… even to the point of evaluating and considering paying for commercial licenses for third part c# libraries to fit the projects… But this rug pull deeply shakes my faith in .Net as a cross platform development ecosystem… I’ve done a complete 180 on my entire enthusiasm for .Net here… I know the underlying tools will continue… but if they don’t give enough of a shit to maintain their IDE (which for the .Net world is absolutely crucial… I cannot emphasise this enough… .Net development requires an IDE to maintain your sanity…) well… This is basically step one in a slow abandonment of non Windows platforms… and everyone who lives on those non Windows platforms… be they Linux of MacOS… we know it spells doom.
    - rpeden 3y ago
      It seems more like they want to concentrate their effort on the C# Dev Kit for VS Code. Whether that proves to be the correct choice remains to be seen, but it seems promising even though it's still early. Since it understands Visual Studio solutions instead of just working at the project level, and has extra things like the test explorer, VSCode essentially _is_ an IDE. I'm sure people will complain, but people _always_ complain about change. I think this one has a good chance of working out for the better, even if the C# isn't as good yet. Regardless, it's probably a better investment for MS than continuing to pile features atop the tired old bones of MonoDevelop in the form of VS for Mac.
    - dgellow 3y ago
      You don’t need Visual Studio for Mac to use C# and .Net. Visual Studio Code provides a pretty good cross platform experience, same for Rider (if you prefer IDEs). VS for Mac has always been a subpar tool compared to VS for Windows, and was competing with vscode. I’m surprised they maintained it for that long, it makes sense they stop now that vscode caught up, that’s where they will invest their energy moving forward. VS for Mac was its own codebase, I believe a fork of Monodevelop renamed Xamarin Studio, then renamed VS for Mac after Xamarin acquisition (I’m saying this from memory, I may be misremembering a few things). The language is still interesting to explore, and .net is incredibly reliable and stable and will stay cross platform, it’s a really good platform to develop for IMHO.
- JaggerJo 3y ago
  Everyone in our team of 5 does.. With JetBrains Rider ist a great experience
- chrisandchris 3y ago
  Not sure about the percentage, but I am one if those. With .Net Core 5+ and Rider, there's not much against Macs for Web Dev. Most things speak for it, especially performance (compared to Win).
- pixelpoet 3y ago
  Unity used to be Mac only for years (around 2008) while still being based on .net / Mono. I can't stand MacOS and neither could any of the other devs at the place I was working, so we had this funky system where we coded in VS, using the MS .net libs, but would deploy against Unity on Mac with Mono to run on iPhone 3gs. Those were strange times :)
- Clubber 3y ago
  Don't know, but I have been using net core / vs code and a Mac since 2019 and switched to the M1 when it came out for the MacBook Pros. I was using VS inside a VM before that since probably 2009 or so.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  A good 95% of the mobile game devs I know who use Macs use Unity. Unity code is done pretty much exclusively with C#. 100% of those people use Jetbrains Rider and/or VScode. One used to use Visual Studio, but moved to Rider a good year ago. C#/.NET today is what Java wanted to be, it's an actually good and comfortable modern-ish language that actually works on multiple platforms.
  - MassiveBonk51 3y ago
    Modern java is a fairly good language. If you don't like it, can always opt into scala, kotlin, or clojure. I don't understand what you mean by Java not working on multiple platforms. If you like c#/.net that's fine but why try to put down Java which has been cross platform for a long time?
    - theshrike79 3y ago
      Cross platform is less and less important nowadays. When was the last time your phone ran a Java application natively? As in you had a legit JVM on your phone? Everything is cross-compiled or cross-translated to something else. I write C# for Unity and it translates it to something that'll run on iOS, which definitely doesn't have the CLR natively in it.
  - highwaylights 3y ago
    The problem, and I say this being 22 years deep in it, is that .NET was never cool. That seems unimportant, but being objectively the best thing going doesn’t build a community or any word-of-mouth around your product. I’d love to think we’d see a thriving Nuget scene on the order of npm or gem, but if it was going to happen it would’ve happened by now.
    - theshrike79 3y ago
      Yeah, it took a LONG time for .NET and C# to get out of the "Micro$oft Bad" -reputation. But having done a good 15 years of Enterprise Java professionally and having moved to C# for the last half decade, there isn't enough money in my country's IT salaries for me to go back to Java. It's not just the language, it's the whole ecosystem that's icky compared to C#/.NET.
- dgellow 3y ago
  I’ve only seen Mac users doing C# with vscode, these days omnisharp (or the new C# dev kit? I’m not familiar with this one) is fairly good (though not VS good IMHO).
- rewmie 3y ago
  > Honestly how many .NET developers ever used a Mac as their work machine? I have to think it's a tiny percentage. I’m not sure this is the best time to look at past performance to predict future developments. Microsoft is actively working on WinUI 3, and Avalonia UI is also dragging WPF to multiple platforms. This comes in a time when GUI programming on Mac is a hot mess. If anything, I expect .NET development on Mac to soar.
  - cutler 3y ago
    > GUI programming on Mac is a hot mess Care to elaborate?
- drunkenmagician 3y ago
  Our entire engineering team (50+) are on Mac + .Net
- bears-n-beets 3y ago
  I do. The company I work for is heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, so a lot of our services are .NET. When I came back here after leaving for a bit I told them it was a dealbreaker that I get a Mac or Linux instead of Windows, so I have a Mac now. I use Visual Studio for Mac pretty regularly. Now I will likely be forced to use the absolute disaster of a VM that the company provides us with (Microsoft-supplied, of course).
akmarinov 3y ago
No one that’s serious about Mac/iOS apps should pick .NET as their cross platform framework. Stick with React Native or maybe Flutter
- throw__away7391 3y ago
  I imagine it is mostly back end devs using Macs though.
- throwaway2990 3y ago
  ^ someone who has never used .net for Mac/iOS.
  - akmarinov 3y ago
    Very few have - that’s the issue
- nickserv 3y ago
  Not all software has a GUI. I've recently started working on a cross platform command line application using .NET 7 and am honestly impressed with the experience.
  - dgellow 3y ago
    How are .Net startup times for your tool, and how do you package your tool? I like modern C# a lot, but would not pick .Net for a CLI tool due to the slow startup times I experienced compared to rust or go. And packaging the runtime has always felt a bit too annoying compared to a native compilation. I would be interested to learn if you had a good experience, I haven’t dealt with .Net CLI apps since a while, I’m sure things improved.
    - kcartlidge 3y ago
      There's no startup time overhead now for my stuff as all my web servers, apis, and command line tooling (.Net CLI apps) are built (by the standard dotnet tooling) into cross-platform stand-alone binaries. They are native code and generally between around 11MB and 20MB depending upon what they do.
dangus 3y ago
It’s not a mistake. VSCode will absolutely catch up if it hasn’t already. Visual Studio for Mac (Xamarin) was already a really niche product with limited appeal. Microsoft bought the company to bring more of the .NET ecosystem under its umbrella. The problem is, the .NET ecosystem is increasingly irrelevant. Why have yet another IDE when all the .NET specific stuff can live in an extension? VSCode is the most popular editor on the planet and it deserves that status. I don’t think Microsoft is all that concerned about the survival of .NET. Cloud computing is where the money is. The new business model is that developers write the apps however they want and deploy to Azure.
neonsunset 3y ago
Enjoying daily driving VS Code for C# a lot, it's really smooth and with LSP, the symbol editing and navigation speed is really high, and it is about 2x ligher on memory and battery than Rider (Rider is good, just not something I use predominantly).
camdenreslink 3y ago
I've enjoyed using VS Code on Mac for editing C#. I haven't really missed anything from full-blown Visual Studio.
WorldMaker 3y ago
VS Code has a MAUI extension in Preview: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/announcing-the-dotnet-maui-extension-for-visual-studio-code/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/announcing-the-d... That extension is an interesting return to official Linux cross-platform support (since MonoDevelop was left as a community effort). I had wondered if a focus on cross-platform efforts in VS Code might spell the death of VS for Mac, but I hadn't expected them to announce it before the MAUI extension and C# Dev Kit extension were both out of Preview. That said, even though I try to avoid Preview extensions in main profiles, I've heard good things about those extensions from those that don't mind as much.
rewmie 3y ago
> They are crippling the app development story for .NET on Mac now IMHO, and it wasn’t great to start with. I had the misfortune of installing and using Visual Studio for Mac last year, and it was bad. The primary disservice that Microsoft did with that app was naming it Visual Studio, which places users expectations on par with the real visual studio line of products, which are feature complete and world class. To me Visual Studio for Mac felt half baked and missing features that were already made available to visual studio code through extension. As Visual Studio Code is still available and it’s support for C# has been continuously improving, I’m confident no one will miss it.
jug 3y ago
MS care less and less for this and probably already internally writing off MAUI as a fools errand. New Teams is a React web app. New Outlook? Yeah, web. Gadgets in Windows 11? Web too. New Windows Copilot (Cortana successor)? Web… Just look at what they do rather than say and the direction is clear. The only true focus (cross platform or not) seems to be .NET itself, TypeScript and web related tech like Blazor or helpers like Windows UI components for React. WPF is maintenance mode, WinForms too, MAUI in two years, WinUI also seeing low or no use among standalone enterprise products from Microsoft.
SamuelAdams 3y ago
I use VS Code on a mac for C# development. I recently discovered this extension and it works really well out of the box. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotnettools.csdevkit https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...

redhale 3y ago

This new (preview) official "C# Dev Kit" VS Code plugin seems relevant, should help close the gap: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotnettools.csdevkit https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne... But also Rider is awesome, and I recommend it to everyone.

NikkiA 3y ago

> Hmm that sounds appealing /s I mean, it's better than 'buy a mac and pay us $100/year'.

SoftTalker 3y ago

> They are crippling the app development story for .NET on Mac Honestly how many .NET developers ever used a Mac as their work machine? I have to think it's a tiny percentage.

clarky07 3y ago
all the ones using it for ios development. i don't know how many did, but this really sucks for those of us that have been using xamarin / .net for ios
saberience 3y ago
A lot! Last company I worked for (40B+ valuation) every developer used a Mac laptop and we were a .net shop. I imagine this is the same at many other companies using .net.
archon 3y ago
I'm one of that tiny percentage, but all of my development is done by remoting into a cloud Windows VM. I tried directly coding on the Mac when I first got it, but quickly gave up on that. (I hate Rider, which seems to put me in minority as far as most .Net devs go.)
- generichuman 3y ago
  What sort of work are you doing that made you give up on C# on mac? Backend or games? I haven't really tried to write serious C# code on macOS, but I did write some CLI tools, which was not bad. VSCode debugging works great too. Obviously .NET is not supported as well as it should anywhere except Windows, but it seems to be getting better.
  - archon 3y ago
    Backend with a lot of existing code that's still in .Net Framework using tech like WCF and Windows Services. I could get away with doing dev directly on the Mac if I was _only_ working in .Net Core on our newer applications and if I was willing to use Rider. Neither of which are true.
tailspin2019 3y ago
For old school .NET Framework, not so much. For .NET 5+… probably more than you think.
- throw__away7391 3y ago
  Yeah, I agree. I see a ton of Rider screenshots on projects, videos, presentation slides these days and I imagine those are almost all Mac users.
- techdragon 3y ago
  As a long term python dev I was starting to warm up to c# and considering it for some upcoming projects… even to the point of evaluating and considering paying for commercial licenses for third part c# libraries to fit the projects… But this rug pull deeply shakes my faith in .Net as a cross platform development ecosystem… I’ve done a complete 180 on my entire enthusiasm for .Net here… I know the underlying tools will continue… but if they don’t give enough of a shit to maintain their IDE (which for the .Net world is absolutely crucial… I cannot emphasise this enough… .Net development requires an IDE to maintain your sanity…) well… This is basically step one in a slow abandonment of non Windows platforms… and everyone who lives on those non Windows platforms… be they Linux of MacOS… we know it spells doom.
  - rpeden 3y ago
    It seems more like they want to concentrate their effort on the C# Dev Kit for VS Code. Whether that proves to be the correct choice remains to be seen, but it seems promising even though it's still early. Since it understands Visual Studio solutions instead of just working at the project level, and has extra things like the test explorer, VSCode essentially _is_ an IDE. I'm sure people will complain, but people _always_ complain about change. I think this one has a good chance of working out for the better, even if the C# isn't as good yet. Regardless, it's probably a better investment for MS than continuing to pile features atop the tired old bones of MonoDevelop in the form of VS for Mac.
  - dgellow 3y ago
    You don’t need Visual Studio for Mac to use C# and .Net. Visual Studio Code provides a pretty good cross platform experience, same for Rider (if you prefer IDEs). VS for Mac has always been a subpar tool compared to VS for Windows, and was competing with vscode. I’m surprised they maintained it for that long, it makes sense they stop now that vscode caught up, that’s where they will invest their energy moving forward. VS for Mac was its own codebase, I believe a fork of Monodevelop renamed Xamarin Studio, then renamed VS for Mac after Xamarin acquisition (I’m saying this from memory, I may be misremembering a few things). The language is still interesting to explore, and .net is incredibly reliable and stable and will stay cross platform, it’s a really good platform to develop for IMHO.
JaggerJo 3y ago
Everyone in our team of 5 does.. With JetBrains Rider ist a great experience
chrisandchris 3y ago
Not sure about the percentage, but I am one if those. With .Net Core 5+ and Rider, there's not much against Macs for Web Dev. Most things speak for it, especially performance (compared to Win).
pixelpoet 3y ago
Unity used to be Mac only for years (around 2008) while still being based on .net / Mono. I can't stand MacOS and neither could any of the other devs at the place I was working, so we had this funky system where we coded in VS, using the MS .net libs, but would deploy against Unity on Mac with Mono to run on iPhone 3gs. Those were strange times :)
Clubber 3y ago
Don't know, but I have been using net core / vs code and a Mac since 2019 and switched to the M1 when it came out for the MacBook Pros. I was using VS inside a VM before that since probably 2009 or so.
theshrike79 3y ago
A good 95% of the mobile game devs I know who use Macs use Unity. Unity code is done pretty much exclusively with C#. 100% of those people use Jetbrains Rider and/or VScode. One used to use Visual Studio, but moved to Rider a good year ago. C#/.NET today is what Java wanted to be, it's an actually good and comfortable modern-ish language that actually works on multiple platforms.
- MassiveBonk51 3y ago
  Modern java is a fairly good language. If you don't like it, can always opt into scala, kotlin, or clojure. I don't understand what you mean by Java not working on multiple platforms. If you like c#/.net that's fine but why try to put down Java which has been cross platform for a long time?
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    Cross platform is less and less important nowadays. When was the last time your phone ran a Java application natively? As in you had a legit JVM on your phone? Everything is cross-compiled or cross-translated to something else. I write C# for Unity and it translates it to something that'll run on iOS, which definitely doesn't have the CLR natively in it.
- highwaylights 3y ago
  The problem, and I say this being 22 years deep in it, is that .NET was never cool. That seems unimportant, but being objectively the best thing going doesn’t build a community or any word-of-mouth around your product. I’d love to think we’d see a thriving Nuget scene on the order of npm or gem, but if it was going to happen it would’ve happened by now.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    Yeah, it took a LONG time for .NET and C# to get out of the "Micro$oft Bad" -reputation. But having done a good 15 years of Enterprise Java professionally and having moved to C# for the last half decade, there isn't enough money in my country's IT salaries for me to go back to Java. It's not just the language, it's the whole ecosystem that's icky compared to C#/.NET.
dgellow 3y ago
I’ve only seen Mac users doing C# with vscode, these days omnisharp (or the new C# dev kit? I’m not familiar with this one) is fairly good (though not VS good IMHO).
rewmie 3y ago
> Honestly how many .NET developers ever used a Mac as their work machine? I have to think it's a tiny percentage. I’m not sure this is the best time to look at past performance to predict future developments. Microsoft is actively working on WinUI 3, and Avalonia UI is also dragging WPF to multiple platforms. This comes in a time when GUI programming on Mac is a hot mess. If anything, I expect .NET development on Mac to soar.
- cutler 3y ago
  > GUI programming on Mac is a hot mess Care to elaborate?
drunkenmagician 3y ago
Our entire engineering team (50+) are on Mac + .Net
bears-n-beets 3y ago
I do. The company I work for is heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, so a lot of our services are .NET. When I came back here after leaving for a bit I told them it was a dealbreaker that I get a Mac or Linux instead of Windows, so I have a Mac now. I use Visual Studio for Mac pretty regularly. Now I will likely be forced to use the absolute disaster of a VM that the company provides us with (Microsoft-supplied, of course).

akmarinov 3y ago

No one that’s serious about Mac/iOS apps should pick .NET as their cross platform framework. Stick with React Native or maybe Flutter

throw__away7391 3y ago
I imagine it is mostly back end devs using Macs though.
throwaway2990 3y ago
^ someone who has never used .net for Mac/iOS.
- akmarinov 3y ago
  Very few have - that’s the issue
nickserv 3y ago
Not all software has a GUI. I've recently started working on a cross platform command line application using .NET 7 and am honestly impressed with the experience.
- dgellow 3y ago
  How are .Net startup times for your tool, and how do you package your tool? I like modern C# a lot, but would not pick .Net for a CLI tool due to the slow startup times I experienced compared to rust or go. And packaging the runtime has always felt a bit too annoying compared to a native compilation. I would be interested to learn if you had a good experience, I haven’t dealt with .Net CLI apps since a while, I’m sure things improved.
  - kcartlidge 3y ago
    There's no startup time overhead now for my stuff as all my web servers, apis, and command line tooling (.Net CLI apps) are built (by the standard dotnet tooling) into cross-platform stand-alone binaries. They are native code and generally between around 11MB and 20MB depending upon what they do.

dangus 3y ago

It’s not a mistake. VSCode will absolutely catch up if it hasn’t already. Visual Studio for Mac (Xamarin) was already a really niche product with limited appeal. Microsoft bought the company to bring more of the .NET ecosystem under its umbrella. The problem is, the .NET ecosystem is increasingly irrelevant. Why have yet another IDE when all the .NET specific stuff can live in an extension? VSCode is the most popular editor on the planet and it deserves that status. I don’t think Microsoft is all that concerned about the survival of .NET. Cloud computing is where the money is. The new business model is that developers write the apps however they want and deploy to Azure.

neonsunset 3y ago

Enjoying daily driving VS Code for C# a lot, it's really smooth and with LSP, the symbol editing and navigation speed is really high, and it is about 2x ligher on memory and battery than Rider (Rider is good, just not something I use predominantly).

camdenreslink 3y ago

I've enjoyed using VS Code on Mac for editing C#. I haven't really missed anything from full-blown Visual Studio.

WorldMaker 3y ago

VS Code has a MAUI extension in Preview: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/announcing-the-dotnet-maui-extension-for-visual-studio-code/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/announcing-the-d... That extension is an interesting return to official Linux cross-platform support (since MonoDevelop was left as a community effort). I had wondered if a focus on cross-platform efforts in VS Code might spell the death of VS for Mac, but I hadn't expected them to announce it before the MAUI extension and C# Dev Kit extension were both out of Preview. That said, even though I try to avoid Preview extensions in main profiles, I've heard good things about those extensions from those that don't mind as much.

rewmie 3y ago

> They are crippling the app development story for .NET on Mac now IMHO, and it wasn’t great to start with. I had the misfortune of installing and using Visual Studio for Mac last year, and it was bad. The primary disservice that Microsoft did with that app was naming it Visual Studio, which places users expectations on par with the real visual studio line of products, which are feature complete and world class. To me Visual Studio for Mac felt half baked and missing features that were already made available to visual studio code through extension. As Visual Studio Code is still available and it’s support for C# has been continuously improving, I’m confident no one will miss it.

jug 3y ago

MS care less and less for this and probably already internally writing off MAUI as a fools errand. New Teams is a React web app. New Outlook? Yeah, web. Gadgets in Windows 11? Web too. New Windows Copilot (Cortana successor)? Web… Just look at what they do rather than say and the direction is clear. The only true focus (cross platform or not) seems to be .NET itself, TypeScript and web related tech like Blazor or helpers like Windows UI components for React. WPF is maintenance mode, WinForms too, MAUI in two years, WinUI also seeing low or no use among standalone enterprise products from Microsoft.

SamuelAdams 3y ago

I use VS Code on a mac for C# development. I recently discovered this extension and it works really well out of the box. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotnettools.csdevkit https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...