has announced that it will discontinue
Visual Studio for Mac IDE
. Announcing the retirement plan, the company confirmed that the latest version of the IDE (Integrated development environment) will continue to be supported for another 12 months and will officially retire on August 31, 2024.
The discontinuation will include “No new framework, runtime, or language support will be added to
Visual Studio
for Mac.”
Visual Studio for Mac IDE to continue receiving updates
In the official announcement post, Microsoft has confirmed that the IDE will continue to receive servicing updates for critical bug fixes, security issues, and updated platforms from Apple till August 31 next year. It is important to note that the company will continue to support alternatives like recently announced C#
Dev Kit
for VS Code and other extensions. This will enable developers to take advantage of ongoing investments in .NET development on Mac.
How users will be affected
“With today’s announcement, we’re redirecting our resources and focus to enhance Visual Studio and VS Code, optimizing them for cross-platform development, ” the company said in the official announcement. “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”, Microsoft added.
Alternatives available
Microsoft has also suggested some alternatives to developers. Firstly, Visual Studio Code with the new C# Dev Kit and associated extensions offers a versatile choice, enhancing the coding experience for .NET and C# developers on macOS. For comprehensive IDE needs, running the
Visual Studio IDE
on a Windows virtual machine (VM) hosted on a Mac is a viable solution, covering legacy projects like Xamarin and F# while facilitating remote iOS development. Additionally, Visual Studio IDE in the Cloud provides cloud-hosted VMs through Microsoft Dev Box, granting access to the full power of Visual Studio for .NET/C# development on a Mac, minus the local VM overhead.
