Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Platform Targeting and Compatibility

Article
9/3/2024

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac contains many new and exciting features and IDE productivity enhancements to support cross-platform desktop app development, cross-platform mobile development, Azure development, web and cloud development, and more. To try out Visual Studio 2019 for Mac, see the Downloads page. For more information about everything that's new in this release, see the Visual Studio 2019 for Mac release notes.

System Requirements

For information on the system requirements for installing and running the Visual Studio 2019 for Mac family of products, see the Visual Studio 2019 for Mac System Requirement page.

Platform Targeting

Visual Studio for Mac provides cutting-edge tools and technologies to create apps that take advantage of the latest platform capabilities, for macOS, Android, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS, as well as web sites, services, and games.

Developing apps for Android
Developing apps for iOS
Developing apps for macOS
Developing apps for ASP.NET Core
Developing apps for Unity
Developing apps for other technologies and platforms

Feature Summary

Mobile app development
- Share code between Android and iOS with Xamarin
- Native iOS and Android UI designers
- Shared UI with Xamarin.Forms
- Protect Android code with Embedded Assemblies
- Visualize and debug apps with Xamarin Inspector *
- Profile your apps with Xamarin Profiler *
Cross-platform "desktop" development
- macOS app development
- .NET Core development
Web application development
- ASP.NET Core development
- HTML, CSS, JSON web editor tooling
Cloud development
- ASP.NET Core WebAPI development
- Publish ASP.NET Core projects to Azure directly from the IDE
Game development
- Unity game development

* Requires Visual Studio Enterprise for Mac

Visual Studio for Mac does not support Windows client projects like Windows Forms, WPF, or UWP.

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Support for Android Development

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac enables you to build native Android apps using Xamarin and C#. You can also use Unity to build Android games.

You can use the Android SDK Manager to easily obtain the Android SDK and Android API levels you'd like for development. You can download additional API levels separately using the Android SDK Manager.

For more information, see Android development with Visual Studio for Mac.

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Support for iOS Development

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac enables you to build native iOS apps using Xamarin and C#. You can also use Unity to build iOS games.

For more information, see iOS development with Visual Studio for Mac.

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Support for macOS Development

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac enables you to build console applications and Cocoa (desktop) applications for macOS.

For more information, see macOS development with Visual Studio for Mac.

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Support for ASP.NET Core Development

ASP.NET Core is an open-source and cross-platform framework for building modern cloud based internet connected applications, such as web apps and services, IoT apps, and mobile backends.

ASP.NET Core apps can be developed and debugged using Visual Studio 2019 for Mac, including the server-side code as well as client side HTML, CSS, and Javascript. They can be hosted on Windows, macOS, or Linux.

For more information, see .NET Core and to get started follow this hands-on lab.

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Support for Unity Game Development

Visual Studio for Mac Tools for Unity is a free Visual Studio extension that turns Visual Studio for Mac into a powerful tool for developing cross-platform games and apps with the Unity platform.

For more information, see Visual Studio Tools for Unity and to get started follow this hands-on lab.

Other Platforms and Technologies

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac also supports the following platforms and technologies. For more information, see https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/mac/.