Microsoft Releases Visual Studio For Mac, Makes It Available For All

After several months in the preview form, Microsoft has finally released Visual Studio for Mac. The version of Microsoft's flagship development tool has been based on the cross platform IDE from Xamarin. Now, the release of the Visual Studio was made public at the Microsoft Build 2017 developer conference held this week.

"Developers get a great IDE and a single environment to not only work on end-to-end solutions - from mobile and web apps to games - but also to integrate with and deploy to Azure," Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group, mentioned in a statement. He further added, "Whether you use C#, F#.NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Xamarin or Unity, you'll get a best-in-class development environment, natively designed for the Mac."

Interestingly, according to ZDNet, Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio for Windows are two different things. Earlier Microsoft made a preview of the Visual Studio in November 2016. Considering this release, the tech giant would also release a preview of.NET Core 2.0 cross-platform runtime technology. The release doesn't come as a surprise as Microsoft had earlier announced its interest to weave Xamarin into Visual Studio at every level.

There are three different versions of Visual Studio for Mac that users can download, it includes Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Enterprise, Visual Studio Professional, MacRumors reported. Microsoft claims its Community to be free and fully featured that has been designed for IDE students and developers. For cloud subscriptions, there are monthly and yearly options available for users interested in high-end Visual Studio plans. Annual subscription for Visual Studio is around $539 per year.

However, some users might feel that Visual Studio would be available for MacOS. Through this, the users would be able to build native mobile, Windows as well as Mac apps in Visual Studio, on the user's Mac. Also, Microsoft has given it an Azure infusion that makes it compatible with all latest cloud infrastructure being announced.