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Microsoft makes Visual Studio for Mac generally available

Microsoft is making its Visual Studio for Mac -- a rebranded version of Xamarin Studio for the Mac -- generally available.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

Microsoft is making its Visual Studio for Mac product generally available today, May 10.

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Officials announced availability of the product on Day 1 of the company's Build 2017 developer conference in Seattle.

Visual Studio for Mac is not a port of Visual Studio for Windows; it's a rebranded version of Xamarin Studio integrated development environment (IDE) that will work on the Mac. (Microsoft bought mobile-tool vendor Xamarin in February 2016.)

Microsoft made a preview of Visual Studio for Mac available in November 2016.

Microsoft also is releasing today a preview of its .NET Core 2.0 cross-platform runtime technology. The generally available version of .NET Core 2.0 should be available in Q3 2017, according to Microsoft's own roadmap.

.NET Core 2.0 allows developers to use .NET Standard 2.0's expanded set of uniform APIs -- including XML, Serialization, Networking, IO, and more to write once and run on multiple .NET runtimes (.NET Framework, .NET Core, Xamarin, and Universal Windows Platform), as Microsoft explains it. ASP.NET Core 2.0, for server-side developers, is also in preview as of today.

A related aside: As the Register reported recently, there's concern in the .NET developer community about some of the directions Microsoft is taking with ASP.NET Core. ASP.NET Core 2.0 won't be targeting both .NET Framework and .NET Core, and instead will target .NET Core 2.0 only.

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