The Latest in Visual Studio 2017 for Mac – Version 7.7

Visual Studio Blog

November 29th, 20180 0

Today, we are happy to share with you the next update to Visual Studio for Mac 2017. Version 7.7 incorporates much of your great feedback and is aimed at improving the core development experience for every project type from .NET Core to Xamarin and Unity. Below are just a few of the new features in Visual Studio 2017 for Mac 7.7 – for the full release notes, please read on here.

Improved IntelliSense with brace completions, smart indenting and lightbulbs

Visual Studio 2017 for Mac 7.7 includes a number of improvements to the IntelliSense experience. Most of the updated features will feel right at home to folks who are familiar with Visual Studio, including quick fix suggestions as well as the “lightbulb” experience. Now, when there are suggested fixes, you’ll get an icon next to the line number which indicates the type of fix available: a lightbulb for a suggestion, a lightbulb with an error symbol for an error, or a wrench for refactoring options and suggestions. We have also made several improvements to brace-matching and smart indenting in this release.

.NET Core 2.2 (preview) Support

If you’re interested in trying out the latest and greatest ASP.NET Core features, you can now work with .NET Core 2.2-based projects in Visual Studio 2017 for Mac. Once you have the .NET Core 2.2 Preview SDK installed, you will able to accomplish all the tasks you currently can with .NET Core 2.1, including creating a new project, opening an existing project, debugging, and deploying.

.NET Core 2.2 can live side-by-side with .NET Core 2.1, so all you need to do is select the appropriate target framework when creating a new project. For existing projects, you can easily update the target framework in the .csproj file. If you don’t want to use .NET Core 2.2 on a project, it will continue to target the same version as before.

There are several improvements in ASP.NET Core 2.2 (Preview) including:

Improved routing with parameter transformers
A new built-in service for link generation
A health-check service for Entity Framework DBContexts
Improvements to the data model validation system
A much faster HTTP client

To learn more about the new ASP.NET Core 2.2 preview features, read on here.

Azure Functions 2.0 support

Azure Functions give you the ability to run your code in a scalable and cost-efficient way using the power of the cloud. Whether you’re creating an API or want to respond to some event, Azure Functions have you covered. This release of Visual Studio for Mac adds support for the latest version of Azure Functions. With version 2.0 of Azure Functions, you now have access to a portable, cross-platform host runtime, which increases the flexibility of your Azure Function deployment. Visual Studio for Mac offers you a beautiful macOS development environment for all your Azure Functions needs.

Xamarin.Android Build Performance Improvements

This version of Visual Studio for Mac is also the first version to feature our work on improving the build performance for Xamarin.Android projects. This was another top request from our users, and we are happy to be able to share our work with you today. The results speak for themselves, with improved deployment and build times, whether it’s the first build or the fiftieth. For example, our test projects saw an average of a four second decrease in incremental build times. More details on the changes, as well as detailed metrics and comparisons, can be found here: https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-android/wiki/Build-Performance-Results.

Support for license verification behind a proxy server

We have addressed the highest voted issue from Developer Community, and now Visual Studio for Mac can be activated from behind many proxy server configurations that we have been able to test with. Addressing this issue took us a while as we were not able to effectively reproduce the issue in-house –we wanted to thank several users who directly worked with us to give us logs and validate the fixes within their environments. If you continue to see issues activating Visual Studio for Mac after this update, please report them via our Developer Community and we will take an immediate look.

Publish ASP.NET Core projects to a folder

We all love Azure, but sometimes you need to publish your ASP.NET projects elsewhere, and we want to ensure that’s a smooth experience. Version 7.7 introduces a new publishing destination: a folder! Now you can publish to any folder or file share (network drive), and either run the page locally or host it anywhere you like.

TFVC Extension Update

Along with Visual Studio for Mac, we are also releasing an update to the TFVC extension. This extension provides support for connecting to both Azure DevOps based TFVC repositories as well as on-premise servers. Though the extension is still in a preview state, we encourage you to install it via the Extension Gallery located under Visual Studio > Extensions and give it a try. The latest preview contains many bug fixes and stability improvements. We welcome any and all feedback that you have on this extension as we prepare to integrate it as a core feature in Visual Studio for Mac’s future updates as previously called out in our roadmap.

Addressing reliability and performance issues in Visual Studio for Mac remains our top priority. Your feedback is extremely important to us and helps us prioritize the issues that are most impacting your workflow. There are several ways that you can reach out to us:

Use the Report a Problem tool in Visual Studio for Mac.
You can track and comment on your issues on the Developer Community portal
In addition to filing issues, you can also add your vote or comment on existing issues. This helps us assess the impact of the issue.

Cody Beyer, Program Manager @cl_beyerCody is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio for Mac team. His main areas of focus are around performance and reliability of the IDE. He enjoys making mobile applications and trying new technologies.