How easy is it to get a program written in visual studio to work on mac

Horlock

I have a program very similar to what I want but I wrote it in visual basic within visual studio. I'm now working for an employer who only uses mac.

Although similar the program will probably be started from scratch, although some of the code should be recyclable.

I could ditch visual studio but I don't know if I'm being silly. Ideally I'd like my new program to work on both mac and pc.

I'm not a programming expert, in fact the last time I wrote any code at all was probably 5 years ago, and have never been formally taught - but always willing to try something new.

That said if it is easy to create a program which will work on both mac and pc from within visual studio then it seems better to stick with what you know.

Mr_Toad

Visual Studio will not run on a Mac, it is designed to run on Windows and Apple run OS X, there is no OS X version of Visual Studio.

You could run it in a VM under Windows but that won't really help you.

You would need to port the VB to a BASIC that will run and compile on the Mac using something like RealBasic which is far from perfect to say the least. For a start none of the Windows API calls or functions will work.

For real portability your code should have been written in C++

Google Coding for OS X to give you some idea what you're up against.

Horlock

Just to clarify I don't want visual studio to run on the mac. Just the program I make in visual studio to run on a mac.

andrewjf

Mr_Toad wrote: »

For real portability your code should have been written in C++

No, for real portability, write it in Java.

Mr_Toad

Visual Studio complies the VB into an exe file to run on Windows. There is no option to compile your program for any other operating system.

VB uses Windows specific runtime libraries and APIs (Application Programming Interface) all specific to Windows.

OS X is a *nix based OS and is completely different, it does not use exe files.

Mr_Toad

andrewjf wrote: »

No, for real portability, write it in Java.

Truly portable yes, once compiled it will run on any machine that has the JVM installed but Java is written in C and much of its syntax is based on C and C++

andrewjf

Mr_Toad wrote: »

Truly portable yes, once compiled it will run on any machine that has the JVM installed but Java is written in C and much of its syntax is based on C and C++

With one big improvement - garbage collection.

prowla

Can you run WINE on a Mac?

andrewjf

prowla wrote: »

Can you run WINE on a Mac?

Apparently you can. I've found it a bit 'hit-and-miss' though on Ubuntu. Some applications don't run.

Lum

Is it written in Visual Basic 6 (or earlier) or Visual Basic.net?

If it's VB.net then you could compile it under Mono to produce a Mac-native version. It may need some tweaking but since you wrote this originally you should be able to handle that, right?

Bonus points: Doing it this way keeps Java off your system.

[Deleted User]

Python or Ruby?