Microsoft has just announced the end of its Visual Studio for Mac. Version 17.6 is the final release, and it will get one more year of support with servicing updates and security fixes. After that, on August 31, 2024, the company will pull the plug on its IDE for macOS.
The company decided to retire Visual Studio for Mac after carefully analyzing user feedback and usage patterns. Also, Microsoft wants to focus its efforts on optimizing Visual Studio, accessible through the C# Dev Kit for VS Code and available on every modern operating system.
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. For the next 12 months, however, we will continue providing essential updates such as servicing updates for critical bug fixes, security issues, and updated platforms from Apple.
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. We hope with these commitments and the investment in the alternatives below, we can minimize the disruption to your workflow on the Mac.
Microsoft encourages users to move to Visual Studio Code with the new C# Dev Kit and related extensions or opt for local or cloud-based Windows virtual machines. Luckily, there is no shortage of free and premium virtualization software for macOS (Parallels Desktop recently received a major update), plus you can use Microsoft"s free developer-focused virtual machines with Windows 11 (evaluation).
You can learn more about the Visual Studio for Mac retirement on the official Microsoft Dev Blog.