After Microsoft today the general availability of, many developers on forum sites questioned if it's really the same IDE that Windows users have known and loved for years, or a refactored, rebadged and rebranded version of -- and no less than Xamarin chief Miguel de Icaza himself weighed in with some answers. De Icaza co-founded Xamarin, which was by Microsoft last year to bring in-house its popular functionality, including the cross-platform ability to create native mobile apps for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows apps with C# code. At its Connect(); 2016 conference last November, Microsoft a preview of Visual Studio for Mac, saying it was 'evolving the mobile-centric Xamarin Studio IDE into a true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for.NET and C#, and bringing the Visual Studio development experience to the Mac.' Even though Microsoft was clear about the Xamarin Studio-based origins of the Mac-based IDE, many developers on Hacker News and the Reddit programming section questioned the inclusion of the Visual Studio brand with the new product. And, showing just how much Microsoft is listening to its developer community, de Icaza and another exec chimed in with clarifying comments. One typical reader comment on said: 'I find the naming 'Visual Studio for Mac' pretty deceptive, since apparently it is not anything like the win32 VS environment, but instead based on Xamarin Studio.

Even the tagline is deceptive: 'The IDE you love, now on the Mac.' ' VS for Mac Product Manager Rajen Kishna replied: 'Our goal with Visual Studio for Mac is to create a native IDE for Mac users with workloads that make sense on macOS. Download directx for mac os x 11.

Visual Studio Community 2017 for Mac A free and full-featured solution for individual developers to create applications for Android, iOS, macOS, cloud.

That means 'desktop app' development will target macOS and Visual Studio (on Windows) can be used to target Windows. 'The core of the IDE definitely has a heritage in Xamarin Studio, but this release has brought in so much more with.NET Core/ASP.NET Core development for Web apps/services, Unity support for game development and cloud integration with directly publishing your Web apps/services and previews of Docker and Azure Functions coming very soon.' [Click on image for larger view.] Scott Guthrie at Build 2017 (source: Microsoft) de Icaza also chimed in: 'I would like to add that we have been reusing a lot of the existing code from Visual Studio in Visual Studio for Mac.' Another reader asked: 'Is this more than just Xamarin? I'm sorry -- I tried last time and that was the impression I got. I know it says it has asp.net core but can I truly build.net Web services based apps now without parallels?'

And again, both Kishna and de Icaza answered. Kishna said: 'It definitely is more than Xamarin, we brought in support for creating Web apps and services with.NET Core/ASP.NET Core, game development with Unity and C#, and cloud integration with publishing your Web apps/services to Azure directly from within the IDE. We're also announcing some preview features coming very soon, including Docker and Azure Functions support, as well as targeting IoT devices like Android Things.'

De Icaza said: 'Yes, you can build.NET Core service apps. You can create new projects, debug them and bonus points - deploy directly to Azure.' Another reader asked: 'Isn't this just MonoDevelop? Or have Microsoft added secret sauce to the mix?'