Apropos of Microsoft discontinuing Visual Studio for the Mac.
My perspective is as someone who mainly used C# on the Mac with Unity. I was a professional C# developer at one point, but not on the Mac.
MonoDevelop, long ago, shipped with Unity on the Mac, and you'd use it for all your C# development. Xamarin Studio was the proprietary counterpart, and the selling point was that you could develop cross-platform mobile apps in C#. When Microsoft purchased Xamarin, Xamarin Studio was rebranded as Visual Studio, which is confusing.
So we are back to MonoDevelop if you want a free IDE for C# you can use on the Mac, with good C# support. VS Code has C# support through a plugin but it's not as good as MonoDevelop.
"While the decision has been made to retire Visual Studio for Mac, we remain committed to our developers on Mac and .NET MAUI with alternatives like the C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code"
Personally I found it slightly funny but only because there is some truth to it. Sometimes I really miss the smoothness of 90s era of app design - you could create relatively complex interfaces and test them very quickly. And the things you learned in Delphi 1 were still mostly valid in Delphi 6. When I compare it to what is needed to create a modern app in React, there is an abyss of difference - in terms of initial setup, tooling complexity, diagnostics, and maintenance.
JetBrains Rider is the most viable alternative. I know it's not open source, but pragmatically it supports Linux/macOS/Windows really well, and has lots of IDE features for linting, auto-completion, and refactoring. I know Microsoft wants people to use VS Code now, but it's just not in the same league yet.
Re:
by andix on Monday September 04, 2023 @04:17AM
(#37378329)
Yes, if you are developing .NET professionally there is no way around Visual Studio (Windows) or Rider.
Visual Studio is free for personal use and smaller companies (community edition), and Rider is not very expensive.
I actually think every developer should have a JetBrains all products license in their toolbox, their IDEs are very useful, support most programming languages and have one of the best SQL IDEs included. Also they are all quite similar, so you can switch to a new programming language without getting used to a new IDE.
Confusing 'Show HN' post - title should perhaps say 'Archived - use VS Code' ?
From the OP download page "Visual Studio for Mac builds on top of MonoDevelop" [1], and the Install link points to Visual Studio for Mac, but this is now discontinued, in favor of Visual Studio Code [2]. The github repo is archived Oct-2021 [3].
Re:
by dvdkon on Monday September 04, 2023 @03:43AM
(#37378130)
It's a shame Microsoft slowly let it die instead of straight-up announcing they're discontinuing MonoDevelop/moving to "VS for Mac". That way, maybe a community maintaining the code would have sprung up. Now anyone wanting to revive the project has a lot of work to up front, starting with "what's the last commit that builds?".
There is DotDevelop, a later fork, but doesn't seem too lively or stable. SharpDevelop died too, so maybe the issue is just adapting to the changes made to .NET with .NET Core.
I am confused, it wants me to install Visual Studio For Mac. I thought this would be an alternative to VS. I am obviously not a citizen of the Microsoft universe. Stuff that may be trivial there is still unknown to me.
My perspective is as someone who mainly used C# on the Mac with Unity. I was a professional C# developer at one point, but not on the Mac.
MonoDevelop, long ago, shipped with Unity on the Mac, and you'd use it for all your C# development. Xamarin Studio was the proprietary counterpart, and the selling point was that you could develop cross-platform mobile apps in C#. When Microsoft purchased Xamarin, Xamarin Studio was rebranded as Visual Studio, which is confusing.
So we are back to MonoDevelop if you want a free IDE for C# you can use on the Mac, with good C# support. VS Code has C# support through a plugin but it's not as good as MonoDevelop.
"While the decision has been made to retire Visual Studio for Mac, we remain committed to our developers on Mac and .NET MAUI with alternatives like the C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code"
Ah I see....
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37368892
Or maybe OP really has worked on all these things. Without more context, it's hard to say.
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
But it seems like the submission is flagged now, it's "sold out" now.
Either way, I'm inclined to agree that JetBrains IDEs are pretty good, as I commented there as well.
Visual Studio is free for personal use and smaller companies (community edition), and Rider is not very expensive.
I actually think every developer should have a JetBrains all products license in their toolbox, their IDEs are very useful, support most programming languages and have one of the best SQL IDEs included. Also they are all quite similar, so you can switch to a new programming language without getting used to a new IDE.
From the OP download page "Visual Studio for Mac builds on top of MonoDevelop" [1], and the Install link points to Visual Studio for Mac, but this is now discontinued, in favor of Visual Studio Code [2]. The github repo is archived Oct-2021 [3].
[1] https://www.monodevelop.com/download/#fndtn-download-mac [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/mac/what-happ... [3] https://github.com/mono/monodevelop
ASP.NET - Create web projects with full code completion support and test on XSP, the Mono web server.
But the XSP project is archived:
https://github.com/mono/xsp
So I wonder for how long XSP will be considered a "plus" for Monodevelop.
There is DotDevelop, a later fork, but doesn't seem too lively or stable. SharpDevelop died too, so maybe the issue is just adapting to the changes made to .NET with .NET Core.