As I understand it, Visual Studio for Mac is simply a re-branded Xamarin Studio and will continue to be. It includes the improvements they had planned for the next release but I doubt they will do a rewrite.

I actually prefer Xamarin Studio over Visual Studio (on Windows) in some respects. For example, the Xamarin.Forms XAML previewer is much better. Looking forward to a full designer.

P.S. I've got a four part blog post series this week on Xamarin.Forms. Starting with this today: https://unop.uk/cross-platform-native-mobile-app-development...

Visual Studio for Mac is a re-brand of Xamarin Studio. However, perhaps more importantly than the software itself, opening the Visual Studio brand to the mac environment signals Microsoft's commitment, yet again, to meeting developers in their chosen environment. Xamarin Studio is also based on MonoDevelop, so maybe this could accelerate a VS linux port, if they're so inclined.

I just started looking into Xamarin Forms and couldn't figure if it was just blindly typing xaml or there was a way to preview it. Thanks for the posts.

Yeah, for now you have to type the XAML but a designer is coming. There is a preview of a previewer but I couldn't get the one in VS to do anything. The XS previewer did work for me though. Make sure Android Studio / ADK is updated if only iOS is working.

I've only tried in VS so far. I'll check XS. Thanks.

I think Microsoft will end-of-life Xamarin Studio and will convert it to Visual Studio brand with just support of OSX and Linux

I wouldn't bet my money on a Linux release

You should, Microsoft will probably release an MS Linux distro soon. (Besides the Debian or whatever they now have for Azure users, I mean.)

MS is going all Oracle-y on us, withdrawing from the consumer market as fast as they can, and heading for the green pastures of the corporate market, where fat happy companies are there to be milked. They are sick and tired of fighting for consumer money one penny at a time.

(XBox is probably not long for this world either.)

The massive investment in the surface line disagrees with you.

.NET Core is for running apps on Linux. For a large chunk of the server market, that is plainly a requirement these days.

But most people writing the apps which then run on Linux, develop them on Macs (and the point of WSL is to give them a reason to consider Windows for this).

You'd probably be better off going with JetBrains' Project Rider on Linux, if you were just doing general .NET work than waiting.

+1 for Project Rider. The EAP is pretty good at this point, it supports debugging for .NET Core and decompiles dependencies when using Go To Definition.

It still has a few bugs and hangs up on me once or twice a day. I think they should have those ironed out soon though.

Really? They seem to be opening up quite a bit more with regards to Linux (.NET Core, WSL, etc).

To me it looks like they are giving people running linux the minimum tools to run that stuff, but at the same time not giving enough to encourage devs to stay on Linux (WSL goes in the opposite direction, its purpose is to help devs move to Windows). But this is all IMHO, take it with a grain of salt.

By the way, since it's based off MonoDevelop, you can just use it con Linux.

I've been using Visual Studio Code on Linux to do some TypeScript development. It's actually pretty nice, and works really well in a general JavaScript environment (npm, etc).

We are waiting since years for a simple xamarin studio for linux, even just supporting only ubuntu and letting the other distro to manage the packages for them... The reality is it seems they don't want at all to bring Xamarin on Linux, sadly Miguel was very clear about it in the years.

IIRC he said they discontinued Xamarin for Linux because of a lack of demand

Thats what this move is. VS for Mac is a rebranded Xamarin Studio.