Hands on with Visual Studio for Mac

Visual Studio Blog

Visual Studio for Mac was released just under two months ago at Build 2017, and already we’ve seen tremendous growth in .NET developers working on the Mac. Visual Studio for Mac enables you to build native apps for macOS, native mobile apps for iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Android, using Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms; and web sites and services using ASP.NET Core. You can also use Unity to build cross-platform 3D games.

To help new Visual Studio for Mac developers get started, we’ve created some hands-on labs to walk through some of its exciting new features. The first two labs are available today, for Unity game development and connecting to Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and we’re planning to release 4 more in the coming weeks.

Lab 1: Building Games with Unity in Visual Studio for Mac

The first hands-on lab demonstrates how to build and debug Unity game projects. It guides you through 4 tasks:

1. Setting up a basic Unity project
2. Working with a 3D game scene
3. Debugging the game script
4. Exploring additional features that support game development.

Follow these instructions to download and install Unity, then use it with Visual Studio for Mac to script and debug a 3D game scene.

Lab 2: Targeting IoT Devices in Visual Studio for Mac

Our second lab shows you how to create apps that run on an IoT device – such as the popular Raspberry Pi – from Visual Studio for Mac. It guides you through 3 tasks:

1. Setting up your Raspberry Pi
2. Creating the IoT project
3. Extending your IoT app with Xamarin components to add additional features.

This functionality is currently in preview, but we’ll make sure to update the lab if any changes will be necessary when we ship it in a stable release.

Follow these instructions to write your first IoT code, then visit our IoT samples for more ideas.

Get Started

Download Visual Studio for Mac today, and visit our labs repo on GitHub to give game development a try or connect to an IoT device. With the Community Edition it is easy and free to get started. Keep an eye on this blog for more labs that demonstrate all the other great features of Visual Studio for Mac.

Craig Dunn, Principal Program Manager @conceptdevCraig works on the Mobile Developer Tools documentation team, where he enjoys writing cross-platform code for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows platforms with Visual Studio and Xamarin.

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