Exploring the Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac IDE

In this section, we'll take some time and explore the Visual Studio for Mac IDE and learn how to configure its visual appearance, how to set font styles, and how to go about configuring and including additional .NET runtime versions. Lastly, you'll learn how to define the Android and iOS SDK locations.

To begin exploring the Visual Studio for Mac IDE, simply follow these steps:

1. From the Visual Studio Community menu, choose the Preferences… menu option, or alternatively press the command + , key combination that can be seen in the following screenshot:

Visual Studio Community for Mac IDE

2. Once you have clicked on the Preferences... button, you will be presented with the following screen:

Visual Studio Community for Mac - Preferences

As you can see in the preceding screenshot, you have the ability to configure environment settings, such as Visual Style, Fonts, .NET Runtimes, SDK Locations, and Tasks, as well as your Google Play Accounts and Apple Developer Accounts.

Configuring and including additional .NET Runtimes

The Visual Studio for Mac IDE Preferences pane provides you with the ability to configure and include additional .NET Runtimes that you would like to compile your application against.

The default runtime that has been set will contain the word (Default) at the end, which signifies that this is the default .NET Runtime that will be used for building and running applications when none has been specified. Refer to the following screenshot:

Visual Studio Community for Mac - .NET Runtimes

From this screen, you have the ability to add new or remove existing .NET Runtimes that you would like to test your applications with, by using the Add or Remove buttons. In the next section, we will look at how to define your Android and iOS SDK locations.

Defining your Android and iOS SDK locations

The Visual Studio for Mac IDE Preferences pane allows you to define both your Android and iOS SDK locations that you can compile your application against:

1. When configuring the SDK Locations for the iOS platform, this will initially default to the current location where the Xcode.app application is located. This is typically found in the Applications folder and will contain the latest iOS platform SDK that has been installed for your version of Xcode:

Visual Studio Community for Mac - Apple SDK Location

2. In order to specify a different location for where Xcode.app is located, click on the Browse… button, which can be seen in the preceding screenshot. Alternatively, you can specify it for the Android platform by selecting the Android node in the SDK Locations section.

3. In this section, you can specify the Android SDK Location and Android NDK Location, as well as the Java SDK (JDK) Location:

Visual Studio Community for Mac - Android SDK Locations

4. You can also install additional SDK Platforms and Tools for the Android platform that you would like to build your application against, or remove those platforms and system images that you no longer wish to target; this can be seen in the following screenshot:

Visual Studio Community for Mac - Choosing Android Platforms

Now that you have explored some of the features contained in the Visual Studio for Mac IDE, our next step is to take a look at, and understand a bit more about, the Xamarin mobile platform, which we will be covering in the next section.