Microsoft announces the retirement of the Visual Studio for Mac

Today, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio for Mac will be retired. The current latest version of Visual Studio for Mac is 17.6 and this version will be supported for another 12 months, until August 31^st, 2024. During this period, Microsoft will be releasing updates for security issues and updated platforms from Apple. Also, Microsoft will provide runtime and workload updates allowing developers to develop apps built on .NET 6, .NET 7, and the Mono frameworks. Microsoft has also enabled rudimentary support for .NET 8 in Visual Studio for Mac for building and debugging apps. However, from now on, Microsoft will not add any new framework, runtime, or language support on Visual Studio for Mac.

After August 31^st, 2024, Visual Studio for Mac will be available as a legacy installation via my.visualstudio.com for users with Visual Studio subscriptions but will no longer be serviced or maintained. Customers with support agreements will have access to technical support until August 31^st, 2024.

Microsoft is recommending the following as alternatives to Visual Studio for Mac:

• Visual Studio Code with the new C# Dev Kit and related extensions: 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.
• Visual Studio IDE running on Windows in a VM on Mac: This option will cover the broadest IDE needs such as legacy project support for Xamarin, F#, and remote development experiences on iOS by using a virtual machine (VM).
• Visual Studio IDE running on Windows in a VM in the Cloud: Visual Studio continues to be the premier tool of choice for .NET/C# development. A Cloud hosted VM from Microsoft Dev Box provides access to the full power of VS through your Web or native RDP client from a Mac without the overhead of running a virtual machine on your local machine.

“Informed by ongoing user feedback and usage patterns for Visual Studio for Mac, we’re focusing our efforts on optimizing Visual Studio, accessible through the C# Dev Kit for VS Code, which is accessible on any OS and Microsoft Dev Box also on any operating system,” wrote Anthony Cangialosi, Group Product Manager, Developer Division at Microsoft.