Since it was released a little more than a year ago, Visual Studio 2017 for Mac has grown from being an IDE primarily focused on mobile application development using Xamarin to one that includes support for all major.NET cross-platform workloads including Xamarin, Unity, and.NET Core. Our aspiration with Visual Studio for Mac is to bring the Visual Studio experiences that developers have come to know and love on Windows to the MacOS and to provide an excellent IDE experience for all.NET cross-platform developers. Over the past year, we added several new capabilities to Visual Studio for Mac including.NET Core 2; richer language services for editing JavaScript, TypeScript, and Razor pages; Azure Functions; and the ability to deploy and debug.NET Core apps inside Docker containers. At the same time, we have continued to improve Xamarin mobile development inside Visual Studio for Mac by adding same-day support for the latest iOS and Android SDKs, improving the visual designers and streamlining the emulator and SDK acquisition experiences. And we have updated the Unity game development experience to reduce launch times of Visual Studio for Mac when working together with the Unity IDE.

Finally, we have been investing heavily in fundamentals such as customer feedback via the Report-a-Problem tool, accessibility improvements, and more regular updates of components that we share with the broader.NET ecosystem such as the.NET compiler service (“Roslyn”), and the.NET Core SDKs. We believe that these changes will allow us to significantly accelerate delivery of new experiences in the near future. While we will continue to make improvements to Visual Studio 2017 for Mac into early next year, we also want to start talking about what’s next: Visual Studio 2019 for Mac. Today, we are publishing a, and in this blog post, I wanted to write about some of the major themes of feedback we are hearing and our plans to address them as described in our roadmap. Improving the performance and reliability of the code editor Improving the typing performance and reliability is our single biggest focus area for Visual Studio 2019 for Mac. We plan to replace most of the internals of the Visual Studio for Mac editor with those from Visual Studio. Combined with the work to improve our integration of various language services, our aspiration is to bring similar levels of editor productivity from Visual Studio to Visual Studio for Mac.