Techie Inspire – The Technology Blog
Despite the fact that the user interface for macOS and Apple CPUs with ARM architecture improvements wasn’t developed until 2022, Microsoft has declared the end of support for Visual Studio for Mac. Visual Studio for Mac’s current version will receive support till August 2024. The business promotes tool and platform switching among developers.
No additional framework, runtime, or language support will be added to Visual Studio for Mac as part of the discontinuation.
In a statement, Microsoft said: “We’re reallocating our resources and focusing on improving Visual Studio and VS Code to make them more streamlined for cross-platform development.”
This is crucial for individuals who are actively using Mono, .NET 6, and .NET 7. .NET 8 is now partially supported in Visual Studio for Mac, despite the company’s lack of official plans to do so. This eliminates the need to switch to different versions of Visual Studio and enables developers to become comfortable with the new features and tools in .NET 8 early on.
Noteworthy updates from the Mac version include a native user interface, Apple M1 and M2 CPU improvements, and complete 64-bit compatibility in Visual Studio 2022. This was the Mac version’s first significant IDE update.
Microsoft advises utilizing the IDE on Windows in a virtual machine or in the cloud as support for Visual Studio for Mac has ended. Additionally, the business mentions cross-platform development tools that work with macOS, including the recently released C# Dev Kit, .NET MAUI and the Unity extensions for VS Code.
VS Code, a free code editor created by Microsoft for Mac, is still available despite the end of support for Visual Studio for Mac. Users of Visual Studio may want to think about Rider, another .NET programming environment, as an alternative.
