Oct 05, 2018 Visual Studio for Mac continues to follow the Microsoft Modern Lifecycle Policy, and Visual Studio 2017 for Mac version 7.8 will be superseded by Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.0 once released. For instructions on updating, see Updating Visual Studio for Mac.
-->If you haven't downloaded and installed Visual Studio and the Visual C++ tools yet, here's how to get started.
Welcome to Visual Studio 2019! In this version, it's easy to choose and install just the features you need. And because of its reduced minimum footprint, it installs quickly and with less system impact.
Note
This topic applies to installation of Visual Studio on Windows. Visual Studio Code is a lightweight, cross-platform development environment that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. The Microsoft C/C++ for Visual Studio Code extension supports IntelliSense, debugging, code formatting, auto-completion. Visual Studio for Mac doesn't support Microsoft C++, but does support .NET languages and cross-platform development. For installation instructions, see Install Visual Studio for Mac.
Want to know more about what else is new in this version? See the Visual Studio release notes.
Ready to install? We'll walk you through it, step-by-step.
Before you begin installing Visual Studio:
Check the system requirements. These requirements help you know whether your computer supports Visual Studio 2019.
Apply the latest Windows updates. These updates ensure that your computer has both the latest security updates and the required system components for Visual Studio.
Reboot. The reboot ensures that any pending installs or updates don't hinder the Visual Studio install.
Free up space. Remove unneeded files and applications from your %SystemDrive% by, for example, running the Disk Cleanup app.
For questions about running previous versions of Visual Studio side by side with Visual Studio 2019, see the Visual Studio 2019 Platform Targeting and Compatibility page.
Next, download the Visual Studio bootstrapper file. To do so, choose the following button, choose the edition of Visual Studio that you want, choose Save, and then choose Open folder.
Run the bootstrapper file to install the Visual Studio Installer. This new lightweight installer includes everything you need to both install and customize Visual Studio.
From your Downloads folder, double-click the bootstrapper that matches or is similar to one of the following files:
If you receive a User Account Control notice, choose Yes.
We'll ask you to acknowledge the Microsoft License Terms and the Microsoft Privacy Statement. Choose Continue.
After the installer is installed, you can use it to customize your installation by selecting the workloads, or feature sets, that you want. Here's how.
Find the workload you want in the Installing Visual Studio screen.
For core C++ support, choose the 'Desktop development with C++' workload. It comes with the default core editor, which includes basic code editing support for over 20 languages, the ability to open and edit code from any folder without requiring a project, and integrated source code control.
Additional workloads support other kinds of C++ development. For example, choose the 'Universal Windows Platform development' workload to create apps that use the Windows Runtime for the Microsoft Store. Choose 'Game development with C++' to create games that use DirectX, Unreal, and Cocos2d. Choose 'Linux development with C++' to target Linux platforms, including IoT development.
The Installation details pane lists the included and optional components installed by each workload. You can select or deselect optional components in this list. For example, to support development by using the Visual Studio 2017 or 2015 compiler toolsets, choose the MSVC v141 or MSVC v140 optional components. You can add support for MFC, the experimental Modules language extension, IncrediBuild, and more.
After you choose the workload(s) and optional components you want, choose Install.
Next, status screens appear that show the progress of your Visual Studio installation.
Tip
At any time after installation, you can install workloads or components that you didn't install initially. If you have Visual Studio open, go to Tools > Get Tools and Features.. which opens the Visual Studio Installer. Or, open Visual Studio Installer from the Start menu. From there, you can choose the workloads or components that you wish to install. Then, choose Modify.
If you don't want to use the Workloads feature to customize your Visual Studio installation, or you want to add more components than a workload installs, you can do so by installing or adding individual components from the Individual components tab. Choose what you want, and then follow the prompts.
By default, the installer program tries to match the language of the operating system when it runs for the first time. To install Visual Studio in a language of your choosing, choose the Language packs tab from the Visual Studio Installer, and then follow the prompts.
Another way that you can change the default language is by running the installer from the command line. For example, you can force the installer to run in English by using the following command: vs_installer.exe --locale en-US
. The installer will remember this setting when it's run the next time. The installer supports the following language tokens: zh-cn, zh-tw, cs-cz, en-us, es-es, fr-fr, de-de, it-it, ja-jp, ko-kr, pl-pl, pt-br, ru-ru, and tr-tr.
You can reduce the installation footprint of Visual Studio on your system drive. You can choose to move the download cache, shared components, SDKs, and tools to different drives, and keep Visual Studio on the drive that runs it the fastest.
Important
You can select a different drive only when you first install Visual Studio. If you've already installed it and want to change drives, you must uninstall Visual Studio and then reinstall it.
After Visual Studio installation is complete, choose the Launch button to get started developing with Visual Studio.
On the start window, choose Create a new project.
In the search box, enter the type of app you want to create to see a list of available templates. The list of templates depends on the workload(s) that you chose during installation. To see different templates, choose different workloads.
You can also filter your search for a specific programming language by using the Language drop-down list. You can filter by using the Platform list and the Project type list, too.
Visual Studio opens your new project, and you're ready to code!
In Visual Studio 2017, it's easy to choose and install just the features you need. And because of its reduced minimum footprint, it installs quickly and with less system impact.
A broadband internet connection. The Visual Studio installer can download several gigabytes of data.
A computer that runs Microsoft Windows 7 or later versions. We recommend Windows 10 for the best development experience. Make sure that the latest updates are applied to your system before you install Visual Studio.
Enough free disk space. Visual Studio requires at least 7 GB of disk space, and can take 50 GB or more if many common options are installed. We recommend you install it on your C: drive.
For details on the disk space and operating system requirements, see Visual Studio Product Family System Requirements. The installer reports how much disk space is required for the options you select.
Download the latest Visual Studio 2017 installer for Windows.
Tip
The Community edition is for individual developers, classroom learning, academic research, and open source development. For other uses, install Visual Studio 2017 Professional or Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise.
Find the installer file you downloaded and run it. It may be displayed in your browser, or you may find it in your Downloads folder. The installer needs Administrator privileges to run. You may see a User Account Control dialog asking you to give permission to let the installer make changes to your system; choose Yes. If you're having trouble, find the downloaded file in File Explorer, right-click on the installer icon, and choose Run as Administrator from the context menu.
The installer presents you with a list of workloads, which are groups of related options for specific development areas. Support for C++ is now part of optional workloads that aren't installed by default.
For C++, select the Desktop development with C++ workload and then choose Install.
When the installation completes, choose the Launch button to start Visual Studio.
The first time you run Visual Studio, you're asked to sign in with a Microsoft Account. If you don't have one, you can create one for free. You must also choose a theme. Don't worry, you can change it later if you want to.
It may take Visual Studio several minutes to get ready for use the first time you run it. Here's what it looks like in a quick time-lapse:
Visual Studio starts much faster when you run it again.
When Visual Studio opens, check to see if the flag icon in the title bar is highlighted:
If it's highlighted, select it to open the Notifications window. If there are any updates available for Visual Studio, we recommend you install them now. Once the installation is complete, restart Visual Studio.
To install Visual Studio 2015, go to Download older versions of Visual Studio. Run the setup program and choose Custom installation and then choose the C++ component. To add C++ support to an existing Visual Studio 2015 installation, click on the Windows Start button and type Add Remove Programs. Open the program from the results list and then find your Visual Studio 2015 installation in the list of installed programs. Double-click it, then choose Modify and select the Visual C++ components to install.
In general, we highly recommend that you use Visual Studio 2017 even if you need to compile your code using the Visual Studio 2015 compiler. For more information, see Use native multi-targeting in Visual Studio to build old projects.
When Visual Studio is running, you're ready to continue to the next step.
Visual Studio for Mac consists of a set of modules called Extension Packages. You can use Extension Packages to introduce new functionality to Visual Studio for Mac, such as support for an additional language or a new Project template.
Extension packages build from the extension points of other extension packages. Extension points are placeholders for areas that can be expanded upon, such as a menu or the list of IDE Commands. An extension package can build from an extension point by registering a node of structured data called an extension, such as a new menu item or a new Command. Each extension point accepts certain types of extensions, such as a Command, Pad, or FileTemplate. A module that contains extension points is called an add-in host, as it can be extended by other extension packages.
To customize Visual Studio for Mac, you can create an extension package that builds from extension points contained in add-in hosts within pre-existing libraries in Visual Studio for Mac, as illustrated by the following diagram:
In order for an extension package to build from Visual Studio for Mac, it must have extensions that build from pre-existing extension points within the Visual Studio for Mac IDE. When an extension package relies on an extension point defined in an add-in host, it is said to have a dependency on that extension package.
The benefit of this modular design is that Visual Studio for Mac is extensible -- there are many extension points that can be built upon with custom extension packages. Examples of current extension packages include support for C# and F#, debugger tools, and Project templates.
Note
If you have an Add-in Maker project that was created before Add-in Maker 1.2, you need to migrate your project as outlined in the steps here.
This section looks at the different files generated by the Add-in Maker and the data a command extension requires.
Extension packages store metadata about their name, version, dependencies, and other information in C# attributes. The Add-in Maker creates two files, AddinInfo.cs
and AssemblyInfo.cs
to store and organize this information. Extension packages must have a unique ID and namespace specified in their Addin
attribute:
Extension packages must also declare dependencies on the extension packages that own the extension points they plug into, which are automatically referenced at build time.
Furthermore, additional references can be added via the Add-in reference node in the solution pad for the project, as depicted by the following image:
They also have their corresponding assembly:AddinDependency
attributes added at build time. Once the metadata and dependency declarations are in place, you can focus on the essential building blocks of the extension package.
An extension point is a placeholder that defines a data structure (a type), while an extension defines data that conforms to a structure specified by a specific extension point. Extension points specify what type of extension they can accept in their declaration. Extensions are declared using type names or extension paths. See the Extension Point reference for a more in-depth explanation on how to create the extension point that you need.
The extension/extension point architecture keeps the development of Visual Studio for Mac fast and modular.
Command Extensions are extensions that point to methods that are called every time it is executed.
Command Extensions are defined by adding entries to the /MonoDevelop/Ide/Commands
extension point. We defined our extension in Manifest.addin.xml
with the following code:
The extension node contains a path attribute that specifies the extension point that it is plugging into, in this case /MonoDevelop/Ide/Commands/Edit
. Additionally, it acts as a parent node to the Command. The Command node has the following attributes:
id
- Specifies the identifier for this Command. Command Identifiers must be declared as enumeration members, and are used to connect Commands to CommandItems._label
- The text to be shown in menus._description
- The text to be shown as a tooltip for toolbar buttons.defaultHandler
- Specifies the CommandHandler
class that powers the CommandA CommandItem extension that plugs into the /MonoDevelop/Ide/MainMenu/Edit
extension point is demonstrated in the following code snippet:
A CommandItem places a Command specified in its id
attribute into a menu. This CommandItem is extending the /MonoDevelop/Ide/MainMenu/Edit
extension point, which makes the Command's label appear in the Edit Menu. Note that the ID in the CommandItem corresponds to the ID of the Command node, InsertDate
. If you remove the CommandItem, the Insert Date option would disappear from the Edit Menu.
The InsertDateHandler
is an extension of the CommandHandler
class. It overrides two methods, Update
and Run
. The Update
method is queried whenever a Command is shown in a menu or executed via key bindings. By changing the info object, you can disable the Command or make it invisible, populate array commands, and more. This Update
method disables the command if it can't find an active Document with a TextEditor to insert text into:
You only need to override the Update
method when you have special logic for enabling or hiding the Command. The Run
method executes whenever a user executes a Command, which in this case occurs when a user selects the Command from the Edit Menu. This method inserts the date and time at the caret in the text editor:
Declare the Command type as an enumeration member within DateInserterCommands
:
The Command and CommandItem are now tied together - the CommandItem calls the Command when the CommandItem is selected from the Edit Menu.
For information on the scope of areas that are available for development, see the Extension Tree Reference and the API Overview. When building advanced extension packages, also refer to Developer Articles. Below is a partial list of areas for customization: Canon lbp 3200 driver download for mac 10 7.
Visual Studio for Mac introduces a new native Cocoa text editor UI built on top of the same editor layers from Visual Studio on Windows.
One of the many benefits of sharing the editor between Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac is that code targeting the Visual Studio editor can be adapted to run on Visual Studio for Mac.
Note
The new editor supports only C# files at this time. Other languages and file formats will open in the legacy editor. The legacy editor does however implement some of the Visual Studio Editor APIs described below.
Before touching on extension details specific to Visual Studio for Mac, it is helpful to understand more about the shared editor itself. Below are a few resources that may deepen this understanding:
With those resources in hand, the primary concepts that you need to be familiar with are an ITextBuffer
and an ITextView
:
An ITextBuffer
is an in-memory representation of text that can be changed over time. The CurrentSnapshot
property on ITextBuffer
returns an immutable representation of the current contents of the buffer, an instance of ITextSnapshot
. When an edit is made on the buffer, the CurrentSnapshot property is updated to the latest version. Analyzers can inspect the text snapshot on any thread and its contents is guaranteed to never change.
An ITextView
is the UI representation of how ITextBuffer
is rendered on screen in the editor control. It has a reference to its text buffer, as well as Caret
, Selection
, and other UI-related concepts.
For a given MonoDevelop.Ide.Gui.Document
, you can retrieve the associated underlying ITextBuffer
and ITextView
via Document.GetContent<ITextBuffer>()
and Document.GetContent<ITextView>()
respectively.
Note
We are currently working on improving the extensibility scenarios for Visual Studio for Mac. If you are creating extensions and need additional help or information, or would like to provide feedback, please fill in the Visual Studio for Mac Extension Authoring form.