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• How To Use Visual Studio 2017 For C++
• C++ Tools Visual Studio 2017

As a .NET developer, I’ve spent most of my time coding on Windows machines. It’s only logical: Visual Studio is the richest development experience for building C# and VB.NET applications, and it only runs on Windows…right?

When I joined Stormpath to work on our open-source .NET authentication library, I was handed a MacBook Pro and given an interesting challenge: can a Mac be an awesome .NET development platform?

To my surprise, the answer is yes! I’ll share how I turned a MacBook Pro into the ultimate Visual Studio development machine.

How to Run Visual Studio on a Mac

Visual Studio doesn’t run natively on OS X, so my first step was to get Windows running on my MacBook Pro. (If you want an editor that does run natively, Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio Code might fit the bill).

There are multiple options for running Windows on a Mac. Every Mac comes with Apple’s Boot Camp software, which helps you install Windows into a separate partition. To switch between OSes, you need to restart.

Parallels is a different animal: it runs Windows (or another guest OS) inside a virtual machine. This is convenient because you don’t have to restart your computer to switch over to Windows. Instead, Windows runs in an OS X application window.

I found that a combination of both worked best for me. I installed Windows into a Boot Camp partition first, and then turned that partition into an active Parallels virtual machine. This way, I have the option of using Windows in the virtual machine, or restarting to run Windows natively at full speed.

I was initially skeptical of the performance of a heavy application like Visual Studio running in a virtual machine. The option to restart to Windows via Boot Camp gave me a fallback in case Visual Studio was sluggish.

There are some minor disadvantages to this method: you can’t pause the virtual machine or save it to a snapshot. A non-Boot Camp virtual machine doesn’t have these limitations. This guide will work regardless of what type of virtual machine you create.

After three months of serious use, and some tweaks, I’ve been very impressed with Parallels’ performance. I haven’t needed to boot directly to Windows at all. (For comparison, my host machine is a 15” mid-2015 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB flash drive.)

In the remainder of this guide, I’ll detail the steps I took to optimize both Parallels and Visual Studio to run at peak performance.

Installing Windows With Boot Camp and Parallels

This part’s easy. I followed Apple’s Boot Camp guide to install Windows in a separate partition.

How To Use Visual Studio 2017 For C++

Then, I installed Parallels and followed the Parallels Boot Camp guide to create a new virtual machine from the existing Boot Camp partition.

Tweaking Parallels for Performance and Usability

The Parallels team publishes guidelines on how to maximize the performance of your virtual machine. Here’s what I adopted:

Virtual machine settings:

• 2 virtual CPUs
• 4096MB system memory
• 256MB graphics memory

Parallels options:

• Optimization: Faster virtual machine, Adaptive hypervisor, Tune Windows for speed all turned on.
• Sharing: Shared cloud, SmartMount, and Access Windows folders from Mac turned off, as I didn’t need these for my workflow.

I experimented with both of Parallels’ presentation modes, Coherence and Full Screen. While it was cool to see my Windows apps side-by-side with OS X in Coherence mode, I found that the UI responsiveness (especially opening and closing windows and dialogs) felt sluggish.

Because of this, I use Full Screen exclusively now. I have Windows full-screen on my external Thunderbolt display, and OS X on my laptop. If I need to use OS X on my large monitor, I can swipe the Magic Mouse to switch desktops.

Adjusting OS X and Windows Features

I fixed a few annoyances and performance drains right off the bat:

• Function keys. If you’re using the Mac keyboard, you’ll want to change the function key behavior so the F1-F12 keys work correctly in Visual Studio. From System Preferences – Keyboard, make sure Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys is checked. With this turned on, hold Fn to use the Mac functions (brightness, volume, etc.) on F1-F12. With an external non-Mac keyboard, this isn’t an issue.

• Start menu. I’m using Windows 8, and the removal of the Start menu annoyed me. I clung to my old ways and installed Start8 to restore it.

• Disable Windows visual effects. I turned off most of the Windows desktop manager visual effects by going to Control Panel – System and Security – Advanced system settings – Advanced – Performance – Settings – Visual Effects and choosing Adjust for best performance. However, I left Smooth edges of screen fonts checked because it improves text rendering on my monitor.

Installing Visual Studio and Helpful Extensions

Installing Visual Studio is a piece of cake once the virtual machine is set up. I simply downloaded the latest release from MSDN and let the installer run.

If you use an Apple Magic Mouse (as I do), Visual Studio tends to be overly eager to zoom the text size in and out as you swipe your finger over the mouse. The Disable Mouse Wheel Zoom add-on fixes this annoyance.

Improving Visual Studio for Performance

I was impressed with how well Visual Studio performed under emulation. With a large multi-project solution open, though, I saw some slowdowns.

Through trial and error, I found a number of things that could be disabled to improve performance. You may not want to make all of the changes I did, so pick and choose your own list of tweaks:

• Disable hardware-accelerated rendering. Unchecking Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance, Enable rich client visual experience, and Use hardware graphics acceleration if available via Options – Environment made the UI feel much more responsive on my machine.

• Start up to an empty environment. Starting up Visual Studio for the first time feels a lot snappier if you skip the default news page on startup. Select Empty environment under Options – Environment – Startup – At startup.

• Remove unused extensions. Visual Studio ships with a number of extensions that you may not need. From Tools – Extensions and Updates – Installed, remove any extensions you aren’t actively using (you can always reinstall them later). I got rid of six extensions I didn’t need.

• Disable extra debugging features. I turned off both Enable Diagnostic Tools while debugging and Show elapsed time PerfTip while debugging in Options – Debugging – General. I wasn’t using these debugging features, and debugging felt snappier after I disabled them.

• Turn off the Navigation Bar. I found the code editor Navigation Bar to be unnecessary if the Solution Explorer is open. I disabled it via Options – Text Editor – All Languages – Navigation Bar.

• Disable CodeLens. CodeLens is a cool feature for collaboration, but it’s not part of my current workflow. I got rid of the CPU overhead by turning it off via Options – Text Editor – All
  Languages – CodeLens – Enable CodeLens.

• Turn off Track Changes. When a file is open in the code editor, Visual Studio will represent recent changes by displaying small regions of green or yellow on the scroll bar. If you can live without this, turn off Track changes via Options – Text Editor – General for a small performance boost.

• Turn off Track Active Item. Squeeze out a little bit more UI performance out by ensuring Track Active Item in Solution Explorer is unchecked under Options – Projects and Solutions – General.

Visual Studio on a Mac: The Best of Both Worlds

With these tweaks, I’ve come to love using Visual Studio on a Mac. The performance is good, and by running Windows in a virtual machine, I get the best of both OS worlds.

Want to see what I’m building with this setup? Check out our open-source .NET SDK on Github.

C++ Tools Visual Studio 2017

Do you have any other tricks you’ve used to improve Visual Studio performance? Any must-have add-ons that boost your productivity? Leave me a comment below!

Today at the Microsoft Build conference, we announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2017 for Mac.

Visual Studio for Mac is a full-featured IDE built natively for the Mac, to help you develop, debug, and test anything from mobile and web apps to games. Teams across PC and Mac can share code seamlessly by relying on the same solutions and projects. This is all offered in an IDE that is natively designed for the Mac and feels right at home for any Mac user.

Workloads for mobile, web, cloud and gaming

Mobile Development with C# and .NET

Visual Studio for Mac provides an amazing experience for creating mobile apps using Xamarin, from integrated designers to the code editing experience to the packaging and publishing tools. It is complemented by:

• The full power of the beloved-by-millions C# 7 programming language
• Complete .NET APIs covering 100% of the APIs for Android, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and macOS development
• The Xamarin.Forms API abstraction to maximize code sharing
• Access to thousands of .NET libraries on NuGet.org to accelerate your mobile development
• Highly optimized native code backed by the LLVM optimizing compiler

Web development with ASP.NET Core and Azure

Since we released the first Visual Studio for Mac preview last November, we’ve been working hard on porting over the web editor tools from Visual Studio on Windows. Now with this release, you have full support to build out rich web-based applications using ASP.NET Core and front-end languages like HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.

And when your web app is perfectly polished and ready for release, you can directly publish to Azure using the new Publish to Azure wizard, without having to leave the IDE.

Building Games using Unity

Newly announced at Build, Visual Studio for Mac now helps you create games using C#, .NET, and Unity.

When paired with Unity 5.6.1 you have full support to build and debug games from within the IDE, including support for:

• Project support, to easily browse and find your scripts
• Code completion for methods invoked from the game engine
• One click debugging support to attach to the Unity editor

Work seamlessly between the Mac and PC

Visual Studio for Mac helps you collaborate with others in your team, regardless of if they’re using a Mac or PC. Solutions and projects work in both Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio, making it easy for heterogenous development teams to collaborate on the same projects, across operating systems. This also means that you can easily “round-trip” between machines, without losing any efficiency.

Built for the Mac

Visual Studio for Mac is a new IDE experience built specifically for the Mac, not a direct port of Visual Studio on Windows. This means that the UI is built to feel like you would expect working with a macOS targeted application, from primitive elements like buttons and text to the layout of the application and icons. We’ve also optimized the developer workflow to what developers on a Mac expect, making it feel right at home, without a steep learning curve to adopt.

A preview of what’s coming up next

With this release, we’re just getting started, so today we also talked about some great new preview features, which we’ll make available in our alpha channel really soon. These are preview features that are not present on the stable release, but ready for you to try once released and give us feedback:

• Docker support: supporting deploying and debugging of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core in Docker containers.
• Azure Functions support: use this preview to develop, debug and deploy Azure Functions from your Mac.
• Target IoT devices: target IoT devices like Android Things with your C# code and Xamarin.

To try out these preview features, you can subscribe to the Alpha channel in Visual Studio for Mac.

Enjoy! And let us know what you think

If you already have Visual Studio for Mac Preview installed, make sure you update to the latest version from within the app. If you haven’t tried out a preview yet, head on over to VisualStudio.com to download the latest release. To learn more about what’s in this release, check out the release notes.

Note: For everyone who downloads Visual Studio for Mac before May 17^th, we’re offering an extended 60-day trial of Xamarin University, free of charge. This includes live instructor-led classes and great content to get you started using Visual Studio for Mac.

We’re very proud of this release and we want to hear what you think – please, send us your feedback! You can use Visual Studio for Mac’s “Report a Problem” or “Provide a Suggestion” dialog (within the Help menu) to provide feedback. Or join the conversation in the Visual Studio for Mac community forums.

Enjoy!

Miguel.