Can I Download Visual Studio On Mac

Emulators make it easy to run and test iOS apps on Windows PC or Mac. These are especially useful for developers who want to know how a specific app will appear and function on the iPhone and iPad. Emulator software works by replicating Apple’s design, interface, and some limited functionality. If that sounds interesting, try these best iOS emulators for PC.

The company announced Visual Studio 2019 for Windows and Mac in June, and started releasing Visual Studio 2019 previews in December. Visual Studio 2019 improves on Visual Studio 2017 across the board. Visual Studio for Mac documentation. Learn how to use Visual Studio for Mac to develop apps and games for iOS, Android, and web using.NET. Visual studio 2010 free download - Visual Studio Code, Visual SEO Studio, Real Studio, and many more programs. Download Visual Studio Community, Professional, and Enterprise. Try Visual Studio IDE, Code or Mac for free today.

1. iPadian

iPadian is more of a simulator than an emulator. That is, it does not create a local version of iOS on your device but gives you a taste of using it. You cannot access the iOS app store, but you can use the apps that have been specially designed for iPadian. These include the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Tiktok, Whatsapp, Crossy road, and more.

This software imitates the design and appearance of iOS but not the features and system actions. The interface is clean and clutter-free while also not consuming a large amount of power. So it’s perfect and the most popular option for all those who simply want to get a feel of iOS on their Windows or Mac computers.

Platform: Windows and Mac
Pricing: $25.00

2. Smartface

Microsoft Visual Studio Free Download

This is one of the best iOS emulators for PC because it provides an incredibly user-friendly experience. It is widely utilized by developers to test the iOS apps that they are creating. This requires an Apple device with the Smartface app to be connected to a Windows system that has iTunes installed.

Once that setup is in place, you can initiate emulation with a couple of clicks and experience a cross-platform programming experience. Further, it is frequently updated to keep up with changes in operating systems. In case you don’t have an Apple device and just want to run some iOS apps, Smartface lets you do so in a browser.

Platform: Windows, Mac, and Linux
Pricing: Free

3. Appetize

Although one can only use this for 100 minutes a month for free, it is an emulator that very closely resembles what an actual iPhone would run like. This is due to features that help users easily develop, test, and update iOS and Android apps. Moreover, it also offers iCloud access, which is an additional benefit.

You can upload your app to its website or through an API. And within mere seconds, your app runs within any major web browser on your PC. The interface is easy to use, and there is a demo available on the website. This is best suited for both independent developers as well as large scale enterprises. There is flexible pricing according to your needs.

Can I Download Visual Studio On Mac

Platform: Windows (works in any browser)
Pricing: $40 per month for the basic plan

4. Xamarin

This is a plugin that you can use in Microsoft Visual Studio to develop iOS apps. It’s quite an advanced iOS emulator that is pretty complicated to configure on PC. But once you do the hard work, you have a powerful tool to code iOS apps from Visual Studio IDE on your Windows computer.

The minimum requirements include a PC with the latest version of Visual Studio and a network-connected Mac that has Xamarin.iOS and the Apple build tools installed. It is powerful enough to support enterprise applications.

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Platform: Windows
Pricing: $99/Month

5. Xcode

Xcode is Apple’s own Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which helps developers create and review the performance of apps. Moreover, they can check the compatibility of their apps on several different iPhone models.

Unlike other emulators, Xcode is made for macOS only; hence, you cannot use it on Windows systems. For iOS developers, they can take full advantage of SwiftUI, which has a declarative Swift syntax.

In a single click, you can bring your iPad app to Mac. Xcode 11 has support for Swift packages; therefore, you can share code among all of your apps or use packages created by the community.

Visual Studio 2019 On Mac

Can I Download Visual Studio On Mac

Platform: Mac
Pricing: Free

6. Adobe Air

This iPhone emulator can replicate the graphical user interface of iOS. Before any developer goes for the final release of their apps, they can use AIR to upload the app. Here, they can check how the app will look like.

However, it should be noted that hardware replication limits do not give an entirely accurate comparison of an app’s behavior. What you see within this emulator may not be precisely what renders or occurs on an actual iOS device. Nonetheless, it’s suitable to get a feel of what your iOS app will look like.

Platform: Windows and Mac
Pricing: Free

7. Electric Mobile Studio

Electric Mobile Studio allows full-fledged emulation of iPhone and iPad apps. You can test out responsive apps, and Windows users can integrate this tool with Visual Studio for convenience.

Further, you can add hot-key navigation for your favorite shortcuts. There are also integrated WebKit and Chrome debugging tools to take advantage of. Once you buy this product, you can use it on two machines to work seamlessly between them.

Platform: Windows
Pricing plans: $39.99 (Free 7-Day Trial)

8. TestFlight

This iPhone emulator is Apple’s officially recommended method for testing iOS apps. It comes with extensive documentation that makes it easier to use. It supports apps for iOS, iMessage, watchOS, and tvOS.

Further, there is an option for external beta testing of your app before a final review that helps get a better picture of any issues faced by users. However, the setup is quite technical, and you will need to have an Apple Developer account to use it.

Platform: Mac
Pricing: Free

Summing Up

So, which of these iPhone emulators have you tried out on your Windows or Mac computer? Share your experience with us in the comments below. You can also check out our guide to run Android apps on your Mac.

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I have been writing about tech for over 10 years now. I am passionate about helping people solve their tech problems with easy and practical solutions. At iGeeksBlog, I write and edit how-to guides and accessory reviews for all things Apple. My work has previously appeared in Live IT and Woman’s Era magazines. When not working, I love reading and traveling.

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Hands On Microsoft this week opened the gates on Visual Studio for Mac 2019 8.3, a flexible development environment for .NET, and The Reg can give you the lowdown on some of the new features.

But first, let's see how the Microsofties got here. Redmond has three coding tools under the Visual Studio brand, all of which have different ancestries.

Visual Studio on Windows supports development not only in .NET languages but also C++, Python, JavaScript and Node.js, and cross-platform mobile development using Xamarin, Apache Cordova or C++. Depending on which edition you have, you also get SQL Server database tools, test and coverage frameworks, Microsoft Office and SharePoint development, R for data science work, built-in Docker tools and more.

Xamarin is a cross-platform .NET framework designed mainly for iOS and Android, but also with support for macOS applications. A confusing thing is that Xamarin does not use .NET Core, though it does support the .NET Standard 2.1 specification in its latest version. See here for guidance.

Xamarin evolved from the open-source Mono framework, an implementation of .NET for Windows and Linux. Mono had its own IDE, called MonoDevelop, which unlike Visual Studio was originally written entirely in C#. Xamarin adapted MonoDevelop to become Xamarin Studio. When Microsoft acquired Xamarin in 2016, Xamarin Studio became a Mac-only IDE and was renamed Visual Studio for Mac. You can still get MonoDevelop for Mac, Windows and Linux, though the Mac download is now Visual Studio for Mac, and on Windows you have to build it from source.

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a cross-platform editor built with the Electron framework, using Node.js and the Chromium browser engine Blink. VS Code was first previewed in 2015 and has been a remarkable success, now ranking as the top development environment on the popular coding Q&A site StackOverflow by a huge margin. Although lightweight in comparison to Visual Studio, VS Code straddles the boundary between an editor and an IDE, with debugging support and a rich range of extensions.

Following the acquisition, Microsoft has been working on sharing some of its Visual Studio for Windows technology with the Mac version. This goes alongside the development of the cross-platform .NET Core, which has allowed code sharing between Mono and .NET Core, though Mono has not been completely replaced. It is still the case that Visual Studio for the Mac is a very different thing from Visual Studio for Windows.

What can Visual Studio for Mac do?

VS Mac is primarily for Xamarin development. The majority of Xamarin developers code applications for iOS and Android, and there are two different approaches to this.

Can I Download Visual Studio On Mac

Visual Studio 2017 Mac Download

Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android let you write non-visual code in C# while using native tools to build the UI, Xcode for iOS or a built-in Android designer for Android.

Xamarin Forms is a cross-platform GUI framework. You design the user interface with XAML and build for your chosen target platforms.

You can also go beyond iOS and Android. Xamarin.Mac is for Cocoa applications and uses a similar model to Xamarin.iOS. Xamarin Forms can also target Windows UWP (Universal Windows Platform) and, in preview, macOS.

There is also steadily improving support for games development with Unity.

A glance at the Xamarin forums gives a crude guide to usage. Xamarin Forms has more than double the activity of any other section (over 51,000 threads). Xamarin.Android 34,000, Xamarin.iOS 21,000, and relatively low activity elsewhere – 343 threads for Xamarin.Mac, for example.

Xamarin Forms Mac support seems to be moribund; it was announced in 2017 but the platform status here was last updated in May 2018 and remains incomplete.

Visual Studio for the Mac also supports ASP.NET Core development using Razor, Angular or React.js, and serverless with Azure Functions.

Under the Vulture's Claw

A cross-platform Xamarin Forms app running on iOS and Android

We installed VS Mac on a 2018 Mac Mini. The installer pulls down the Android SDK for you, but you have to install Xcode separately. All straightforward, but there is a puzzle about .NET Core. Version 3.0 is installed automatically, and you can create ASP.NET Core apps, but when you go to create a mobile app, the option to create an ASP.NET Core API back end is disabled because it 'requires an ASP.NET Core installation'.

The look and feel of the IDE is different from Visual Studio on Windows, as you would expect from the product history. It feels more basic and less refined, and has only a fraction of the features of its similarly named cousin.

There is no visual designer for Xamarin Forms, but there is a visual preview. Unfortunately, this did not work for iOS on our very simple demo app, showing instead a MonoTouch exception message. But the app itself worked fine on both Android and iOS. The IDE did crash once or twice but with no loss of work.

Another experiment was to create a Xamarin.Mac application and edit the generated storyboard, which defines the user interface using Xcode. This worked perfectly.

What's new?

Can I Download Visual Studio On Macbook Pro

VS Mac 8.3 supports .NET Core 3 and C# 8.0, and Xamarin now supports Android 10, Xcode 11 and iOS 13.

One of the big new features, though in preview, is XAML hot reload in Xamarin Forms. This lets you amend the XAML file defining your UI, save it, and see the changes instantly in the app running on an emulator or device.

The Visual Studio Mac native editor shares code with Visual Studio on Windows

Can I Download Visual Studio On Mac

The C# editor in VS Mac was rewritten by the Visual Studio team after the Microsoft acquisition. It now has what Microsoft calls a 'fully native UI', raising the interesting question of how much of the old MonoDevelop code, which used cross-platform Gtk#, remains in VS Mac. The new native editor was fully released in July, but VS Mac 8.3 now supports web editing (JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS and more). This lets Microsoft share more features between Visual Studio on Windows and VS Mac, including improved IntelliSense. You also get proper bidirectional text support and a natty feature called multi-caret editing that lets you overtype multiple regions of selected text simultaneously.

There is a new dialog for the NuGet package manager, but care is needed because not all NuGet packages will work on the Mac.

These are highlights; the full list of what's new is here.

Observations

Microsoft has two successful Visual Studio development tools, and then there is VS Mac, which is important only for Mac-based Xamarin developers. Xamarin.Mac and Xamarin Forms targeting macOS are both interesting for .NET developers wondering how to get their Windows apps onto a Mac, but both are neglected relative to iOS and Android. If you want to develop for ASP.NET Core you would be better off with Visual Studio on Windows, and probably better off with VS Code with its much larger community and rich extension support. Strategically, it might make sense for Microsoft to invest in making VS Code more useful for Xamarin developers. All that said, VS Mac is substantially improved and the price is right: even the free Community edition is a capable tool. ®

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