What's New in Visual Studio for Mac 7.4 -- Visual Studio Magazine

What's New in Visual Studio for Mac 7.4

By David Ramel
03/07/2018

Microsoft this week announced the availability of Visual Studio for Mac 7.4, which now supports recent versions of Android, macOS and C# among many other new features.

While new functionality has been introduced -- such as support for Android Oreo 8.1 and macOS High Sierra -- Microsoft said a primary focus of the dev team for VS for Mac 7.4 was fixing reported issues like memory leaks, performance problems and stability concerns.

Myriad issues fixed in this release range from the IDE hanging when a Xamarin.Forms project is loaded to not having to restart the IDE to get unit tests to run as expected.

The new support for Android Oreo 8.1, meanwhile, means Xamarin.Android developers can leverage newer technology such as:

Android Go (for entry-level smartphones)
Neural Networks API (for running computationally intensive operations for machine learning on mobile devices)
Autofill Framework updates (for filling out forms)
SharedMemory API (enables the creation, mapping and protection control over anonymous shared memory)

On the Xamarin.iOS side of things, the team boosted wireless deployment and debugging functionality across both iOS and AppleTV devices. "When a device is connected via a network and ready to be used for deployment, it now shows up in the device target list, as if the device were connected through USB," Microsoft said in the release notes.

Associated with that, developers are now asked to unlock a deployment device before an app is launched, which can now be done without interrupting a debugging session.

Visual design tooling was also updated for both the iOS and Android designers.

Support for the new C# 7.1 means developers can avail themselves of new functionality such as an async Main method, default literal expressions and inferred tuple element names. You can read more about that new functionality in this article. Microsoft also detailed Roslyn-powered core architectural changes for C# editing that provide improved IntelliSense performance and typing responsiveness.

At the same time VS for Mac 7.4 was announced, Microsoft shipped Visual Studio 2017 15.6, with improved solution load performance topping a list of new functionality.

More details about what's new in VS for Mac 7.4 can be found in our earlier coverage of a preview release.

Visual Studio for Mac was introduced after Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin, building upon that company's Xamarin Studio IDE, which was in turn based on the open source MonoDevelop project. It serves as an adjunct offering along with the Windows-based Visual Studio family of IDEs (which include Xamarin for cross-platform mobile apps) for development on a Mac machine. It comes in Community (free), Professional and Enterprise versions.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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