Microsoft has announced that the company plans to discontinue Visual Studio for Mac next year.
The latest version of the company’s IDE (integrated development environment) for Mac will continue to be supported by Microsoft through August 2024.
Microsoft offered the following statement:
“With today’s announcement, we’re redirecting our resources and focus to enhance Visual Studio and VS Code, optimizing them for cross-platform development. No new framework, runtime, or language support will be added to Visual Studio for Mac.”
As part of the wind-down process, Microsoft has committed to supporting Visual Studio for Mac with security updates and platform update compatibility for the next 12 months.
Per Microsoft:
“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. While not officially supported, we’ve also enabled rudimentary support for .NET 8 in Visual Studio for Mac for building and debugging applications.”
The Visual Studio 2022 application 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 Visual Studio for Mac support has ended, Microsoft has recommended accessing its IDE through Windows in a virtual machine on the Mac or through a cloud-based app. Microsoft also pointed to applications such as the C# Dev Kit, .NET MAUI, and Unity Extensions for VS Code, which 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.
Although Visual Studio for the Mac (IDE) will be discontinued by August 2024, VS Code (rich text editor) for Mac will stick around. Rider, a competing .NET IDE, is another alternative that Visual Studio users can try out.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via 9to5Mac and devblogs.microsoft.com