Visual Studio 2019 for Mac becoming usable...sort of

By Jason, 20 March, 2020

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I wanted to get a discussion going regarding VS2019 to see if anyone else is using it and any successes or failures with it. I have been a commercial software developer for nearly 20 years on VS for Windows so the bar is high for me.
My observations:
- The text edit area is finally accessible, but getting focus to it is a serious pain.
- In Windows I had shortcut keys to jump to the solution explorer, the error window, immediate, locals, etc. Now I am having to literally navigate through the entire visual object model to get from one explorer (or pad as it is called on the Mac) to the next.
- This is the real deal breaker for professional use--the voice over cursor will not follow the debugger focus and gives no indication when the VoiceOver cursor travels over the current debugger execution line. This makes it impossible to use the debugger.
Anyone else using this software? How has your experience been?

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Comments

By mehgcap on Sunday, March 15, 2020 - 20:41

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

I recently begun using VSCode on Windows, and have been extremely impressed. I've reported a couple accessibility bugs, and the team has responded not just with requests for more details, but with timelines and actual fixes. Compred to the slow pace of accessibility improvements in Xcode, this is wonderful.

I briefly tried VSCode on Windows, and was rather disappointed. Focus was the main issue, as you pointed out. I basically found a lot of the announcements and automatic focus changes didn't work correctly. Hopefully others will be able to offer some suggestions. If not, I encourage you to open issues on VSCode's Github page, so that the team is at least made aware of the current problems, whether or not they can do anything.

I am actually using the full version of Visual Studio 2019 for the Mac. It wasn't accessible at all a short while ago for writing code but a lot of improvements have been made. Since there is a community version any developer not writing commercial software for a large company can have access to the full IDE. I didn't have any luck with VS Code for the Mac. If they could fix the issues with the debugger then it would be a viable development IDE, but unfortunately if I can't debug software then I might as well be writing my code in notepad.