After launching Visual Studio for Mac you’ll see the dialog below, click New to begin creating the project. Since global tools are console applications, we will use the console project template to get started. The first thing you’ll want to do when creating a global tool is to create a project.

Modify the project file to make it a global tool.

To create our tool, we will work through the following steps: Let’s create a very basic global tool that will print “Hello World” to the user. The code we will be reviewing in this post is available on GitHub, a link is at the end of this post. To ensure you have everything you need to follow this tutorial, download Visual Studio for Mac. Today, we will be using Visual Studio for Mac, but you can follow similar steps if you are using a different IDE or editor.

Let’s get started with our first global tool. In this post we will discuss how you can create global tools when developing on macOS as well as how to prepare them to distribute using NuGet. NET Core Tools - local installation section in Announcing.

You can also create local tools, those that are associated with specific projects and not available globally.

NET Core is cross platform, your global tools will also work cross platform, assuming your code doesn’t contain any platform specific code. After developing your tool, you can distribute it on, or any other NuGet repository, to share the tool with others. For example, you can create tools to minify image assets, simplify working with source control, or perform any other task that you can automate with the command line. You can use global tools to simplify common tasks during your development workflow. NET Core is the support for global tools.

Install visual code on mac