Visual Studio 2019 for Mac v8.5 Ships -- Visual Studio Magazine

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac v8.5 Ships

By David Ramel
03/24/2020

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.5 shipped this week, improving ASP.NET Core authentication and unit testing, adding support for Azure Functions 3.0 and more.

Microsoft said the dev team paid special attention to developer feedback in this release, which focused on polishing the existing experience.

Here's a brief look at the highlights:

ASP.NET Core authentication: An additional project creation wizard screen has been provided to developers who create an ASP.NET Core app that supports No Authentication or Individual Authentication using an in-app store. The screen provides options to choose "No Authentication" or "Individual Authentication (in-app)."

**[Click on image for larger view.]** ASP.NET Core Authentication *(source: Microsoft).*

Unit Test explorer: This received fixes to more closely match the unit test nesting experience on Windows.
Debugger: This now sports the ability to edit function breakpoints, along with better stepping performance.
Solution Explorer: The team addressed duplicate entries for launchSettings.json and appsettings.json, detailed in this issue.
NuGet: Issues with packages failing to update were fixed, along with tweaks to the NuGet Package Manager and an update to the NuGet distribution to match the latest version also found in Visual Studio.
Official support for Azure Functions 3.0: Developers can now build and deploy functions -- often used in event-driven serverless computing -- with the 3.0 runtime. "You'll find templates to help you get started with serverless computing under the Cloud > General section in the create new project dialog. You can follow the tutorial here to get started with your first Azure Function in Visual Studio for Mac," Microsoft said in the announcement post.

The latest iteration of the Mac-based Visual Studio IDE is available for download here.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.
Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.
Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.
AdaBoost Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.
Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.