Microsoft Accidentally Reveals Visual Studio Finally Coming To Mac; November Launch Expected?

In an accidental blog post, Microsoft let slip its plans of launching Visual Studio for Mac through its latest cross-platform program Xamarin Studio, a C# development program which Microsoft acquired last year when it took over Xamarin, a company developing cross-platform .NET programming tools.

Microsoft is hosting the Connect() conference in New York City on Wednesday and a day ahead of the event, a blog post surfaced revealing one of its biggest news - Visual Studio for Mac, only to be taken down several minutes later.

Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac is a MacOS version of the Microsoft Visual Studio complete with the development experience offered in its forerunners. It has IntelliSense and refactoring features using the Roslyn Compiler Platform, it also has MSBuild, TextMate compatibility, Xamarin debugger and .NET Core applications, with the familiar cross-platform Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS.

Microsoft focused on compatibility issues in the development of Visual Studio for Mac. While the new product may not support all files in the Microsoft version, the company added MSBuild to fix cross-platform compatibility. Team members with both platforms can switch between the two operating systems and can share files across the platform without conversion.

Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac enables developers to create ASP.NET Core App from the pre-released version. Aside from that, the program has mature support for iOS, Android, and Mac platforms which uses XAML-based development program. As with the Microsoft version, Visual Studio for Mac has drag-and-drop cross-platform mobile OS allowing developers to assemble the user interface.

The blog post has been taken down, but Google's cached version still remains. With the premature leak of the Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac, it is safe to say that Mac programmers who have long been waiting for this big news will be able to enjoy C# coding sooner than later.