Microsoft has announced the discontinuation of Visual Studio for Mac. The latest version of the Mac integrated development environment (IDE) will be supported by Microsoft until August 2024.
“With today’s announcement, we are redirecting our resources and focus to improving Visual Studio and VS Code, optimizing them for cross-platform development,” the company said in a statement. “No new frameworks, runtime environments or language supports will be added to Visual Studio for Mac.”
As part of the program’s wind-down, Microsoft has pledged to support Visual Studio for Mac with security and compatibility updates over the next 12 months.
“We will also continue to provide rantime and vorcload updates so you can continue to build and ship applications built on the .NET 6, .NET 7 and Mono frameworks,” Microsoft said in a statement. “While there is no official support, we’ve also included rudimentary support for .NET 8 in Visual Studio for Mac for building and debugging applications.”
Visual Studio 2022 for Mac has undergone a major upgrade to include a native UI and optimization for Apple Silicon, and for the first time, full 64-bit operation. Microsoft first brought VS to the Mac back in 2016.
Once Visual Studio for Mac is discontinued, Microsoft recommends accessing its IDE via Windows in a virtual machine on a Mac or in the cloud. Otherwise, Microsoft points to cross-platform developer technology that will work on macOS:
“The recently announced C# Dev Kit, .NET MAUI and Unity Extensions for VS Code are available in preview and are designed to extend the VS Code experience for .NET and C# developers. These extensions work on all supported platforms, including macOS, and the experience will improve as you move from the preview version to GA and beyond.”
While Visual Studio for Mac is being discontinued, VS Code (text editor) for Mac will remain.