Microsoft has announced plans to discontinue Visual Studio for Mac. The latest version of the company’s IDE (integrated development environment) for Mac will continue to be supported by Microsoft through August 2024.
“With today’s announcement, we’re redirecting our resources and focus to enhance Visual Studio and VS Code, optimizing them for cross-platform development,” the company said in the announcement. “No new framework, runtime, or language support will be added to Visual Studio for Mac.”
As part of the wind down, Microsoft has committed to supporting Visual Studio for Mac with security updates and platform update compatibility for the next 12 months.
“We will also continue to provide runtime and workload updates so you can continue building and shipping applications built on .NET 6, .NET 7, and the Mono frameworks,” says Microsoft. “While not officially supported, we’ve also enabled rudimentary support for .NET 8 in Visual Studio for Mac for building and debugging applications.”
Visual Studio 2022 introduced a major overhaul for the Mac version including a native user interface and Apple Silicon optimization while going full 64-bit for the first time. Microsoft first brought VS to the Mac in 2016.
Once the wheels fall off Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft recommends accessing its IDE through Windows in a machine virtual on the Mac or in the cloud. Otherwise, Microsoft points to cross-platform compatible developer technology that will run on macOS:
The recently announced C# Dev Kit, .NET MAUI, and Unity Extensions for VS Code are available in preview and are intended to augment VS Code’s capabilities for .NET and C# developers. These extensions operate natively across all supported platforms, including macOS, and the experience using these will continue to be improved as they move from preview to GA and beyond.
While Visual Studio for Mac (IDE) is being discontinued, VS Code (rich text editor) for Mac will stick around. Rider, a competing .NET IDE, is another alternative that Visual Studio users can take for a spin.
You can read the full announcement from Microsoft here.
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