Sean Davis

Call To Action

Come one, come all. We are rallying for Microsoft to add features to allow Mac users of Visual Studio 2017 and onward to install the Azure SDK installation bundled with PowerShell so Mac users will be able to deploy ARM templates as they would in Windows.

The Case

For those of you who know me, I give a lot of talks on ARM and Azure as it’s near and dear to my heart. I recently struck out on a journey to understand more about the iOS side of the house in my most recent blog series. In my journeys, I discovered that Mac was missing some of the features I had come to love about Windows Visual Studio. Upon speaking to some of my peers they were also equally as disappointed. Even worse, the lack of the features actually turned them off to pursuing Azure as an option as they didn’t want to change their current software just to try something else and I can’t blame them. The perception is that if it required adding another tool to the toolbox at an engineer level it stands to reason this would require greater changes as it moved up the business chain. So I started a customer voice page and would like to ask for your participation.

I’m not a Microsoft only advocate, I’m a try all the available options that make sense and make an educated decision based on facts and fit advocate. With that said, I believe it’s a huge gap that Azure SDK is not available for Mac and given PowerShell (the main component behind ARM templates) is now open source, it’s wholly possible to install PowerShell on Mac now and leverage the same features in Mac that we have come to know and love in Windows.

The Ask

If you support the cause (or just want to make Visual Studio just a little better for those on Mac), make sure to make your way over and click –> Microsoft Customer Voice page <– and up-vote for this feature, the more votes the faster we can get this feature added. Thank you for all your support and making the Visual Studio community better, one vote at a time! I look forward to the feedback and comments you may have as well.

If there are other features you’d enjoy with Visual Studio or even other Microsoft products. I would recommend you create a voice and encourage others to join in the rally for your feature. You also get a set amount of points and I encourage you to peruse not only Visual studio but other Microsoft technologies and vote for other things in which you may be interested.

Thank you for your support and hopefully, together we can bring the Mac one step closer to a major gap in feature parity.