Microsoft is making available the latest versions of Visual Studio, its integrated development environment, for Windows and Mac users.

“That’s really the inspiration behind the Visual Studio 2019 release,” she said, adding that Visual Studio today was suited to developing in a broad range of programming languages.

Microsoft is open sourcing WPF, Windows Forms and Win UI via GitHub and making available the first public preview of Visual Studio 2019.

Visual Studio Live Share, which is now installed by default in Visual Studio 2019, helps developers collaborate in real time, including desktop app sharing, source control diffs, and code commenting.

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1 for Windows and Mac, .NET Core 2.2, and .NET Core 3.0 Preview 1 at Microsoft Connect (); 2018.

Microsoft also will integrate the Visual Studio Live Share collaboration feature into both Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio Code, the open-source version of the commercial product.

Microsoft announced the first preview of Visual Studio 2019 will be available before year's end, with general availability of the flagship IDE expected in the first half of 2019.