Microsoft’s Connect(); 2016 developer event in New York City today had some big partnership announcements, including,,. But there was also a slew of updates for both Visual Studio and SQL Server: a preview of Visual Studio for Mac, a preview of the next version of SQL Server, and a preview of Azure App Service support for containers. “We want to help developers achieve more and capitalize on the industry’s shift toward cloud-first and mobile-first experiences using the tools and platforms of their choice,” Microsoft Cloud and enterprise executive vice president Scott Guthrie said in a statement. “By collaborating with the community to provide open, flexible, and intelligent tools and cloud services, we’re helping every developer deliver unprecedented levels of innovation.” Visual Studio The fact that Microsoft is bringing its to macOS would have arguably been the biggest news of the day, had the company not leaked the information itself earlier this week. Still, a preview of Visual Studio for Mac is now available (, requires OS X El Capitan 10.11 or higher), letting developers write cloud, mobile, and macOS apps on Apple’s desktop operating system using.NET and C#. It’s a big deal, given that Microsoft once made a point of locking in developers by only offering its tools on Windows. This has changed over time, with a big highlight in April 2015 when, its cross-platform code editor, for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Now Microsoft is taking the next step: making Visual Studio cross-platform. Inheriting from the mobile-centric Xamarin Studio and from Visual Studio for Windows, the IDE is supposed to encourage Mac and iOS developers to use Microsoft’s development tools, since they will no longer need a Windows computer or virtual machine to do so. It will hit general availability next year, and Microsoft will eventually sunset Xamarin Studio. Here’s how Xamarin project manager Mikayla Hutchinson described the tool in the leak on Monday: At its heart, Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio. If you enjoy the Visual Studio development experience, but need or want to use macOS, you should feel right at home. Its UX is inspired by Visual Studio, yet designed to look and feel like a native citizen of macOS.

Inkscape is a completely free vector graphics editor available for Windows and OS X, making it the perfect alternative choice for budget-conscious designers on both mainstream operating systems. Inkscape. Inkscape Want an open source Illustrator alternative?

And like Visual Studio for Windows, it’s complemented by Visual Studio Code for times when you don’t need a full IDE, but want a lightweight yet rich standalone source editor. Below the surface, Visual Studio for Mac also has a lot in common with its siblings in the Visual Studio family. Its IntelliSense and refactoring use the Roslyn Compiler Platform; its project system and build engine use MSBuild; and its source editor supports TextMate bundles. It uses the same debugger engines for Xamarin and.NET Core apps, and the same designers for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android. Compatibility is a key focus of Visual Studio for Mac. Although it’s a new product and doesn’t support all of the Visual Studio project types, for those it does have in common it uses the same MSBuild solution and project format.

The only two options I can see are git and subversion. I tried entering the url using the subversion option and it did ask me for credentials but the correct credentials never worked.

If you have team members on macOS and Windows, or switch between the two OSes yourself, you can seamlessly share your projects across platforms. There’s no need for any conversion or migration. Visual Studio for Mac supports native iOS, Android, and Mac development via Xamarin, and server development via.NET Core with Azure integration.

The C# language, with the latest C# 7 productivity enhancements, is naturally supported, as is F#, powered by the same F# compiler used in Visual Studio. Meanwhile, in the Windows world, Visual Studio 2017 has now hit Release Candidate status (). Formerly referred to as Visual Studio “15” (or Visual Studio Next), this version is slated for general availability in early 2017. But that’s not all for the Visual Studio world.

Nat Friedman, Xamarin cofounder and now Microsoft’s vice president of mobile developer tools, also shared some notable milestones with VentureBeat. Has passed 20 million installs, with 14 million coming from the free community edition. Passed 3.5 million installs and 1 million monthly active users, up from in April. Also worth noting is a preview of a new product called Visual Studio Mobile Center (). Think of it as mission control for mobile app developers; it works for all apps regardless of programming language. Here’s the rub: It supports Android and iOS today, while Windows is “coming soon after.” SQL Server Microsoft announced the public preview of the next release of SQL Server, which for the first time runs on,. The new version lets you develop applications with SQL Server on Linux, Windows, Docker, or macOS (via Docker) and then deploy to Linux, Windows, or Docker, on-premises or in the cloud.