Microsoft's Cross-Platform Tools Aim for Mac, OS X -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft's Cross-Platform Tools Aim for Mac, OS X

Redmond's release of several tools for developing apps on Apple platforms during the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference couldn't have been timed any better.

By Michael Domingo
06/16/2015

Last week, during the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft announced a bevy of tooling updates within the Visual Studio suite for developing apps on Apple platforms.

The announcements consisted mainly of a roundup of tools that allow development within the Apple ecosystem, rather than new news, though, as some of the tools have been in development and in developers' hands for a while. The announcements last week included a few subtle updates.

If there was any news of significance, it was Microsoft highlighting the capability to develop iOS apps through its refinement of tools for using JavaScript and Apache Cordova. The most recent Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova CTP 3.1 has been in development for the last year.

What's new, in particular, is the addition of templates for Monaca and Ionic UI frameworks, which allow developers to create UIs that conform nicely to iOS devices or allow something that looks branded.

Also new: a cross-platform agent that allows developers to use Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2015 in conjunction with OS X builds using Cordova or native Xcode projects. That means that developers can use TFS or Visual Studio Online to build and preview projects from a Mac or a dedicated Mac hosting provider.

Times have changed, and here's something you probably would never have whispered within 25 feet of the Microsoft campus: "Within the TypeScript team, many of us have Macs that we use for development." That's Jonathan Turner, Microsoft program manager for the TypeScript team, who wrote on his blog last week on expanding TypeScript 1.5 support to work with Mac tools, and in this case the popular Sublime text editor, which means capabilities such as tooltips are enabled fully.

Microsoft weeks ago announced Visual Studio Code, which is capable of running on Macs natively. Also, Visual Studio Online is capable of connecting to a number of private Git repositories, as well as the Apple Xcode IDE as if it were a native environment.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.