Declaring a “bright new day for our friends in Macintosh-Land,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today unveiled Visual Studio 2010 for Mac OSX, expected to be available this summer. Speaking to a full crowd at the Medenbauer Center, Ballmer reminded the audience that Microsoft is one of the oldest and most competitive ISVs for Apple’s Macintosh platform. The company’s Excel spreadsheet software first appeared for Mac in 1985, he bellowed, two full years before Microsoft released a Windows version.
“We never stopped loving the Mac,” he shouted, waving an iPhone. “Every day, our Windows 7 dev team is inspired by the great work being done by visionaries in Cupertino.” Standing in front of a giant poster of an Apple iPad tablet computer, Ballmer screamed, “now it’s time to give something back!”
The centerpiece of Visual Studio for Mac OS X is its native implementation of Apple’s preferred object-oriented programming language, Objective-C, which is used by both Mac OS X and iPhone/iPad developers. According to Ballmer, the new Visual objective-C IDE will also appear in Visual Studio 2010 SP1 for Windows. Applications written in the Smalltalk-inspired language will require only a simple recompile to run on both Mac and Windows 7, he said.
Playing to the cheering developers at the software launch, Ballmer then showed Visual Basic for Mac OS X, another component of the Visual Studio for Mac OS X suite. “You asked for it, you got it!” he shrieked, before being buried by a hailed of rose petals and hotel keys tossed by ISVs and industry analysts. Ballmer said that the Visual Studio for Mac OS X suite (expected to ship by Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, June 8-12) is expected to woo developers from Apple’s Xcode. “I know you love your Xcode,” he roared, “but I promise you’ll love your Visual Studio for Mac even more!”
On-stage demos at the event included Macintosh integration with Visual Studio Team System; using Visual Basic with Apple’s iPhone SDK to build a voice recognition application for iPhone and iPad; and porting BioShock 2 from Windows to Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” Baller apologized for the tool chain’s lack of support for versions of Mac OS X prior to 10.5 “Leopard,” saying, “We’re only human, okay?”
As he was leaving the stage, Ballmer turned back. “Oh, just one more thing, “ he cried – and then showed off the company’s full .NET Framework 4.0 for Mac OS X, available for free download from the Microsoft website. “We love you, Apple!” he whooped, bringing the event to a triumphant close.
After reading this article I was overwhealmed with joy that Visual Studio is finally making its way , until I noticed that the date of the actual article was April 1st, and the name of the Author is "I.B. Phoolen", as in "I am fooling you"! After about an hour of searching I could find nothing to proove any of the above, which pretty much means it is an April fool's joke and a very cruel one at best. Good one guys! You had me going there for about an hour or so. 
Pete Soheil
DigiOz Multimediahttp://www.digioz.com/
3 comments:
Hi Pete.
I just installed VS2010 Pro yesterday and played with it a few hours, so like you, after reading the article in SD Times about an hour ago saying VS2010 was being ported to OSX I was totally excited! I even typed an email to a few fellow developers until I could find nothing via Google about it outside the SDTimes post then your blog post.
Yeah, we were sniped, and for me it was two weeks late...
Take care...
Sam Alex
Hey Sam,
Yeah, that was a very cruel April Fool's joke. Just imagine the possibilities if it was true!
Oh well, I guess its back to Mono Framework for VS Developers on Mac. :)
Pete
I read last line first. I saved my time :)
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