It’s likely this week Microsoft will be making this announcement. You can read what I think about it here and why it’s not really anything to be too concerned about for Xojo.
Geoff Perlman wrote in the Blog:
our goal has always been to make Xojo easy for those learning programming for the first time, hobbyists, citizen developer
You have work on your plate to achieve that 
Depends. If MS really want this to be successful, they for sure have the resources. Thats something Xojo Inc is lacking (big times).
So VB for Mac could be big in a short time (or fails in a short time).
[quote=298402:@Emile Schwarz]>Geoff Perlman wrote in the Blog:
our goal has always been to make Xojo easy for those learning programming for the first time, hobbyists, citizen developer
You have work on your plate to achieve that :([/quote]
Xojo needs to:
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Work more on the documentation. A lot of it is very thin.
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Get the frameworks sorted out. Too many of the methods I need use the old frameworks. And if I have:
result = myfunc ("some text here")then “some text here” is a string, not a Text.
I don’t agree with the lack of documentation. Microsoft is not better. Actually, VB is not that well documented. Xojo has more than adequate a documentation.
I would tend to regard the new framework for the moment as an addition, not a replacement, until indeed it can do everything the classic framework does. Of course not in iOS, where it is the only game in town.
As for VS for Mac, indeed it should not change much for Xojo users. The real choice for a Mac Xojo user who wants more is not VB, it is XCode.
But for people who already are accustomed to VS, and want to foray in Mac, it could be a good idea.
Actually, I personally will probably try to play with it to see how it feels.
It’s actually not. A quoted literal’s type is now context-dependent and it’ll be whichever is asked of it.
But this “new” product is “new” in name only… this “Visual Studio for Mac” has little if any resemblence to “Visual Studio for Windows”… as Geoff indicated, it is Xamarin with a new bow tied around it
Nevertheless, people who routinely develop with VS may find it easier to deal with than XCode. Well. We shall see.
The last time I looked at Xamarin there was no unified language. You did your Android code and your iOS code using their respective languages in something similar to a #IF. Maybe it’s different now but at the time I saw no advantage of writing it twice even if it was in the same tool.
You can go unified or not unified in Xamarin. (Xamarin forms is the way to go unified - somewhat new), its not so mature so many go not unified and just have their lower layers as common code.
This isn’t about bring VB to the Mac. The alleged VS for Mac will use C# as the language.
Indeed. So it has very little to do with Xojo.
I have heard that VB.NET will come to .NET core so it would support VB.NET on Mac eventually. Without WinForms support however it would not be for desktop applications. Perhaps ASP.NET Core applications so limited use. It seems inevitable that the WinForms replacement (aside from WPF) will eventually exist that is cross platform and powered by .NET. Maybe not in 2017 but certainly by 2018 there will be some cross platform story for .NET desktop applications.
Have you looked at the Visual Code editor on the Mac? Very well designed and implemented. They apparently have some sort of Desktop layer in the works. It also looks the same on all three platforms. It’s made me finally abandon VI as my editor of choice for OS X and Linux.
[quote=298431:@Tim Jones]Have you looked at the Visual Code editor on the Mac?
[/quote]
Yes
[quote=298431:@Tim Jones]It also looks the same on all three platforms.
[/quote]
And native on none of them
Oh yeah I use it every day. Visual Studio Code is essentially a web app. It’s powered by Electron (http://electron.atom.io).
You could conceivably do the same thing with Xojo desktop apps using the HTMLViewer. I do that for several apps. The main issue I run into is that the copy of CEF included with Xojo is pretty old at this point. I believe it’s because they switched to a multi-thread model it makes it challenging to integrate into Xojo. Hopefully they are able to overcome that or making cross platform apps with a modern web UI will become more challenging as Javascript evolves.
I was reading this “leak” or “hit publish too early” blog post at MSDN blog yesterday my time. It has since been removed but a copy of the removed blog post is found here:
it will do macOS app, in addition to mobile.
It’s more than I thought however… And I suppose that 25% of professional users is more in terms of revenue. Also, It is often the professionnal users that drive the more the community (forum, XDC, plugins, app gallery, blogs…).
This would mean that VS on the Mac is not a competitor to Xojo (for reasons I do not see enlighten me please). If on the other hand it is a competitor, Xojo should be afraid. It would mean that there is no way to grow more into the market of professional developers. Nobody accustomed to Swift (which will appear for .NET at some point) or C# will trade their language against a language rooted on BASIC and feature-wise lagging behind a decade or so.
I also think cross-platform is dead and that the future is multi-platform: write the M…C part of MVC once and have separate …V…-parts for each platform. In the end this is what most of us are doing when using Einhugur’s controls, MBS’s plugins or when investing tons of hours in declares to get a native listbox on the desktop. And for Web and iOS projects in Xojo we also all do it that way.
I am not sure VS on Mac won’t entirely be a Xojo competitor. Some users of Xojo precisely came to it because VB would not do on Mac. If VS is able to take VB sources and generate executables on Mac and iOS, chances are a significant number of mainly VS developers won’t look at Xojo.
Sure, VS will not have native controls, but given the present trend of UI doing away with popupmenus, and a lot of native controls anyway, in favor of lists, and a general design closer to Web, emulated controls may do just fine.
Once again, all will depend on the target market. I can see how corporate clients can ask for the same app already created in VS to be ported to iOS or Android, and they probably could not care less if controls are native if the app actually performs just the same.
For general public apps, I am not really sure all users see the difference. And with more and more apps in online stores, the life cycle of apps becomes so short, the most important is the RAD aspect, not necessarily the native controls. I see in the MAS copycats that visibly use non native controls, but turn around their crap very fast.