Microsoft is Retiring Visual Studio for Mac

Microsoft announced that it is retiring Visual Studio for Mac, though the current version will be supported for one more year. This is not a huge loss: with Visual Studio Code (VS Code) adopting .NET Maui and advanced C# language support this year, the standalone Visual Studio for Mac is redundant and unnecessary.

“We remain committed to our developers on Mac with alternatives like the recently announced C# Dev Kit for VS Code and other extensions that will allow you to take advantage of our ongoing investments in .NET development on a Mac,” Microsoft’s Anthony Cangialosi explains. “Informed by ongoing user feedback and usage patterns for Visual Studio for Mac, we’re focusing our efforts on optimizing Visual Studio, accessible through Microsoft Dev Box on any operating system, and the C# Dev Kit for VS Code, which is accessible on any OS.”

Visual Studio for Mac was always a bit of an outlier. It was never anything like full Visual Studio for Windows, but was rather an updated version of Xamarin Studio, the cross-platform mobile app solution that Microsoft acquired with that company in 2016. Microsoft rebranded it to Visual Studio for Mac and recently updated it to support .NET MAUI, which is an updated version of Xamarin’s Xamarin.Forms cross-platform app framework.

But with the much more popular and cross-platform VS Code editor now able to perform those duties, Visual Studio for Mac is no longer necessary. And there are other options for .NET developers on Mac, too: they can virtualize Windows using a product like Parallels Desktop, which is excellent, and access full Visual Studio for Windows that way. Or, they can run full Visual Studio for Windows in a cloud-hosted virtual machine in Microsoft Dev Box.

Microsoft says that it “will continue providing essential updates such as servicing updates for critical bug fixes, security issues, and updated platforms from Apple” over the next 12 months, and it will continue updating the .NET runtimes and workloads in Visual Studio for Mac so that developers can continue building applications built on .NET 6, .NET 7, and the Mono frameworks. (Note that .NET 8 ships later this year and will not be officially supported.)