It is based on the MonoDevelop core with many new extensions to support new workloads (.NET Core, Azure Deployment, Unity development).
Additionally, over the past year we have replaced started to replace the internals of MonoDevelop with code from Visual Studio that we have been open sourcing.
In addition to what has been open sourced and integrated so far, we have a strong pipeline of additional features and capabilities that will bring even more Visual Studio code into the IDE.
We are roughly on a 6-8 weeks release cadence that aligns with the Visual Studio release cadence, so you will see various subsystems get new capabilities continuously from this point on.
More than that, if they're willing to deliver a port of Xamarin/MonoDevelop to Mac and call it VS, it's at least funny that they won't do that for Linux. There is no actual need for that, but since they're refactoring Xamarin...
Where do we speak up about this? I remember when Xamarin Studio was released on Mac, and I tried to look for a Linux build, there wasn't a place where I could ask about it, except a Reddit AMA. Hacker News discussions around release time of a non-Linux product don't seem like a good place to ask about Linux support either.
And I'm pretty sure I'm one of few who even hopes for it anymore.
It would be great if in addition to voting, you can articulate some reasons for why you care, add a personal touch, in the end, we would love to know what our users care the most about.
Many people don't seem to understand the internals of all this... MonoDevelop is the core of XamarinStudio and Visual Studio for MAC, so essentially when these guys add features they are in reality adding them to monodevelop. So think of it as:
Visual Studio Mac = MonoDevelop + macOS extensions
Xamarin Studio = MonoDevelop + extensions
MonoDevelop = Libraries, ASP.Net, GTK#, Xwt, Console Apps, etc.
What's important here is that porting over the real VS to Mac or even Linux is not practical. You won't also see mfc/win32 support on mac or linux (on the foreseeable future) because those are extremely tied to the windows architecture which is far from being compatible with unix, most people just don't get it. Same case for developing say, iOS applications, you just can't do that without macOS because you need the tooling, so its not really up to Microsoft.
What I think could be accomplished relatively easy is a XamarinStudio/VisualStudio/Monodevelop on Linux with support for Android development since you already have the tooling available there, the IDE would just wrap up the core code/tools. Also, there is no truly multiplatform desktop framework as each platform has its intricacies but there's an actual toolkit (poorly named, btw) called Xwt which is what monodevelop uses in some parts and draws native widgets depending on the platform is running, something like what Qt does.
Isn't this just MonoDevelop? Or have Microsoft added secret sauce to the mix?