Microsoft has announced the general release of Visual Studio 2022 for Mac 17.0. It brings big changes including a native macOS UI and support for Apple Silicon processors. According to the company, it"s also releasing a new preview which you can install side-by-side with this version.
In older versions of Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft had used various UI technologies which made things look out of place. This update uses the native macOS UI. In addition, the backend is running on .NET 6 and it runs natively on Apple Silicon processors. Together these improvements mean Visual Studio 2022 for Mac can operate up to 50% faster than its predecessor.
On a technical level, Microsoft said this release allows you to build applications with .NET 6 and C# 10. It said Azure Functions v4 is supported and allows you to develop serverless applications on .NET 6.
Going back to the preview which was mentioned earlier, Microsoft is now offering Visual Studio 2022 for Mac 17.3 Preview 1. It focuses on adding tooling support for .NET 7 and .NET MAUI. Microsoft will also attempt to incorporate feedback from users and move to native UI for lesser-used features such as the Task/TODO list. If you want to learn more, check out the release notes.