Good question. There already is Visual Studio Code available for all OS’s, but it’s more like advanced text editor than IDE. Since C# and.NET is becoming multiplatform, it would make sense to have VS running on Mac. Currently it is not possible to developing with Excel using visual studio in Mac. It looks like you want to develop with VSTO in MAC. So that you can use the VBA object model and power of visual studio.
I can see that Office 2016 for Mac now supports add-ins. How do I go about developing one?Will it be possible to convert existing VSTO-developed COM add-ins for Windows to the Mac version?
pnutsVisual Studio For Mac Wikipedia
taralex3 Answers
No, there is no tool for converting VSTO based add-ins (i.e. COM add-ins) to Office Apps. You need to develop Office Apps (Add-ins) from scratch.
FYI MS rebranded Office Apps as Office Add-ins at the Build#15 conference. See Get started with apps for Office in MSDN for more information.
Eugene AstafievEugene AstafievYes, you can use and develop Office Addins on Office 2016 for Mac.
Here's some instructions on how to Sideload Office Add-ins on iPad and Mac for testing
If you are on a Mac but don't have Office 2016, you can test and debug your add-in with Office 365 online (which should be accessible from any machine with a web browser).
These add-ins are different from the VSTO ones, in that they are built with web technologies (HTML, CSS, & Javascript). This has a number of benefits (cross-platform by default, large developer community, etc). I'm not aware of any way to convert the older formats to the new one.
For more details, here's the developer documentation for the new Add-ins API.
If you can create add-ons but it is very different from how it is done with VSTO here you have to load the add-in from a server and the task panel displays an html page with the required functionality although for example for excel it does not have the office API .js persistence you can not as with VSTO save the active Workbook locally and other restrictions