You might not know this about Mono and Xamarin: they got started in and around Boston, Massachusetts, which is, coincidentally, where I live, too. Assumptions Are Corrected and Lunches Are Eaten Let's get into my experiences with Visual Studio for Mac and the fateful lunch that got me to give Visual Studio for Mac a try with. So far, I've been talking about Visual Studio Code despite this being an article about Visual Studio for Mac. That was the shove that really got me comfortable with the development of. ( ) I did almost all of the demos on the Mac. I decided to write and record a Pluralsight course “Architecting an ASP.NET Core MVC Application for Unit Testability” on the Mac. The summer of 2018 was when the real shift happened. I probably spent 40% of my time on MacOS and 60% of my time on Windows. (By the way, it seems that I'm the only person on the planet who doesn't mind the current incarnation of the MacBook Pro keyboard.) I tried as much as I could to write code using Visual Studio Code on the Mac but I still spent a fair amount of time running Visual Studio on a Windows virtual machine (VM). Life with a MacBookĪlthough my journey started off a little rough, I loved having an iMessage client and a WhatsApp client with a proper keyboard. And hey! There would be iMessage! I went out and bought a MacBook Pro. NET Core pool and force yourself to swim (well, code). She felt that if she continued working primarily with Visual Studio on Windows, she'd never really learn it because Visual Studio was way too helpful. In a conversation with Entity Framework expert Julie Lerman, I learned that she really wanted to increase her proficiency in cross-platform. It turns out that I wasn't the only person wondering how to fit the cross-platform cloud into their career.

I thought about the future of my career and realized that the next 10 years look distinctly less Windows-y and a whole lot more cloud-y. My Microsoft-centric Windows-only world is getting a whole lot more cross-platform. Docker and containers are now a pretty popular paradigm and SQL Server runs on Linux. Silverlight, a framework for rich Internet apps and Windows Phone, came and went and JavaScript is no longer a curse word.

Several years went by with me being super annoyed about the lack of a Windows iMessage client. But that's on Windows and, well, there's no iMessage client on Windows. I've been writing ASP.NET Web applications with Visual Studio since the early betas of the. NET applications or working with Azure DevOps (formerly Team Foundation Server). The difficulty was that I'd spent my life in Windows either writing. Almost everyone I regularly talk to was or is on iMessage. You're probably thinking that I went to Visual Studio for Mac because I wanted to write software for iOS. My path to Visual Studio for Mac almost happened by accident.

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