Microsoft is launching Visual Studio 2019 today. And along with the Windows launch, Microsoft is also launching Visual Studio 2019 for Mac.

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac focuses mostly on the same things as Visual Studio 2019 for Windows. It introduces a new start experience that helps you get started quicker, and work with your existing/new projects much faster than before.

But more importantly, Visual Studio 2019 for Mac brings a new C# editor that brings the best of Visual Studio to the Mac. Microsoft says the new editor has been built on the same shared core with Visual Studio on Windows, so the coding experience will be identical, but it will continue to have an interface that matches the native macOS design. Microsoft says the new C# editor allows for smoother editing and navigation, as well as powerful code-completion with IntelliSense, smarter suggestions, support for bi-directional text, multi-caret editing, word wrapping, and more.

Microsoft isn’t fully launching the new editor today, though — instead, the new C# editor is launching as a preview and you will need to enable it manually from the IDE’s settings. Microsoft says it’s working to bring it to more languages as well, starting with XAML.

The latest version of Visual Studio for Mac also allows for multiple instances, which has been one of the much-requested features, according to Microsoft.

Visual Studio 2019 also brings over the Unity debugger from Visual Studio on Windows to the Mac, offering a better debugging experience for developers while allowing Microsoft to apply fixes across both Visual Studio on Windows and Visual Studio on Mac at the same time.

Microsoft says Visual Studio 2019 for Mac packs a whole bunch of performance improvements, too — with faster performances across the new C# code editor, Git support, Xamarin, and .NET Core debugging.

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac is available for download today, and Microsoft wants to improve its feature parity with Windows going forward as the company looks to bring over Xamarin Forms XAML language service from Windows to the Mac, as well as adding support for multi-targeting, solution-level package management and file-nesting support for ASP .NET Core.

Tagged with Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio 2019 for Mac