Visual Studio for Mac version 7.5 Preview 1

Visual Studio

March 21st, 2018

Earlier this month, we released version 7.4 of Visual Studio for Mac, our IDE for developers on macOS who are building mobile, web, and cloud apps. Today, we’re announcing the first preview of Visual Studio for Mac version 7.5, which you can get by changing the updater channel in Visual Studio for Mac to use the Beta channel. In this release, the top highlights include:

Adding new editor support for Razor, JavaScript, and TypeScript.

Improving Azure Functions development with support for the .NET Core Preview SDK and with the introduction of new Azure Functions templates.

Adding support for the latest releases of .NET Core and C#, with .NET Core 2.1 Preview and C# version 7.2.

Making it easier for Xamarin.Forms developers to build apps using .NET Standard.

Continuing to improve IDE performance and stability.

See the full Visual Studio for Mac 7.5 Preview release notes to learn about all the changes that made it into this release.

Web Development with Razor, JavaScript, and TypeScript

Editor support for Razor, JavaScript, and TypeScript have been some of the top web developer requests we have heard. In this release, new editors are being introduced for each of these languages.

With official support for Razor, you now have syntax highlighting and IntelliSense while editing your C# in .cshtml files.

In previous releases, our JavaScript editor included support for syntax highlighting and colorization. Now, it’s rewritten to provide smarter colorization, IntelliSense, brace completion, and the rest of the core editor experience. At the same time, support is being added for TypeScript editing; providing the same colorization, IntelliSense, and editor experience as JavaScript.

Behind the scenes, these three were made possible thanks to a lot of hard work from the Roslyn and Visual Studio JavaScript tooling teams – and Visual Studio for Mac re-uses source code from these editing experiences as they appear in Visual Studio 2017 on PC.

Build serverless solutions with Azure Functions

Last year, we introduced preview support for Azure Functions – enabling development of Azure Functions using C# and .NET with full debugger tooling – based on the Mono runtime. Now, a new Functions template dialog is included, along with support for the .NET Core Preview SDK.

Azure Functions templates enable you to quickly create new functions using the most common triggers and templates. You can access these by creating a new Azure Functions project, right-clicking on your project, and choosing the Add > Add Function… menu.

.NET Core 2.1 and C# 7.2

Visual Studio for Mac version 7.5 Preview 1 is the first release supporting the .NET Core 2.1 Preview SDK. You can read all about the .NET Core 2.1 Preview release in the announcement blog post. Some of the top improvements: faster build performance, closing gaps in ASP.NET Core and EF Core, better compatibility with .NET Framework, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Security compliance. We’ve also added support for C# 7.2.

.NET Standard and Xamarin.Forms

Mobile developers will be happy to see that .NET Standard Library projects are now a fully supported option for sharing code between platforms when building Xamarin.Forms solutions. This release brings numerous bug fixes to improve the .NET Standard developer experience (see the release notes).

Improving performance and reliability

Finally, we continue our push to improve performance and reliability in the IDE. This release focuses on improving IDE startup time, which has decreased by as much as 50% for some users. We’re also fixing top issues and crashes as they come into the Developer Community site – please keep the feedback coming! Some of the top fixes in this release:

Feedback

We can’t do this alone and we need your help to make the product better! Please try out the Visual Studio for Mac version 7.5 Preview 1 release by installing Visual Studio for Mac now and switching to the Beta update channel in the IDE. Share your comments and bug reports with us on the Developer Community site; you can get there quickly by using the Help > Report Problem… menu from the IDE. We also welcome feature suggestions on our UserVoice site, which you can also access from the Help > Provide a Suggestion… menu.