Join the Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Private Preview

Jordan Matthiesen

Today we’re inviting you to try out Visual Studio 2022 for Mac as we share our first private preview release. This is the first release of our .NET IDE with a refreshed, fully native macOS UI. We’d love for you to download it, try it out, and share your feedback to help us shape the next major release of Visual Studio for Mac.

The Visual Studio 2022 for Mac preview can be installed side-by-side with earlier versions of Visual Studio for Mac and is free to use.

Our goal with Visual Studio 2022 for Mac is to make a modern .NET IDE tailored for the Mac that delivers the productive experience you’ve come to love in Visual Studio. This release focuses on:

  • Improving IDE performance and reducing crashes with a new fast and fluid native macOS UI.
  • Taking advantage of more of macOS’s built-in accessibility features.
  • Updating the experience to feel more familiar between Mac and Windows.

With this private preview, we’d like to share our new native macOS UI and hear from you about what we got right and where we need to keep iterating. Visual Studio 2022’s fully native UI is the result of an engineering effort that included substantial changes to the UI layer with a focus on some key technical internals. With these major investments, we are setting the stage to deliver improved stability and performance in the final release. This update affects every part of Visual Studio for Mac, so the scope is much bigger than our usual previews.

A fast and fluid experience, for everyone

We’re moving Visual Studio for Mac to native macOS UI, which will fix over 100 previously reported issues related to performance, reliability, and product quality. An added benefit of using native macOS UI is that the IDE works more smoothly with macOS’s built in assistive technologies. Some of the biggest improvements for accessibility include support for new High Contrast themes and a more intuitive experience with VoiceOver. In this initial preview release, we’re giving you a glimpse at the IDE and have focused on the main features .NET developers use to build applications for the web. The video below gives you a quick feel for some of the improvements made to improve the speed and fluidity of the UI.

A modern .NET IDE hand-tailored for the Mac

We’ve introduced a new look and feel in Visual Studio for Mac that combines the modern macOS UI with the productive experience you’ve come to know and love in Visual Studio. Some of the most visible changes include a footer status bar, new tab model for documents/tool window, and refreshed light & dark themes.

Screen shot of Visual Studio 2022 for Mac when debugging an ASP.NET Core project.

A more familiar experience for Visual Studio users

The updates to Visual Studio for Mac’s UI aren’t just visual. As part of our goal to make the developer experience more consistent between Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac, we’ve made changes to menus and terminology across the IDE. These adjustments were made with consideration for both the Visual Studio and macOS experience with the intent that developers will have an easier time following tutorials written for Windows and using existing muscle memory to find options. We’re also bringing the new Git experience from Visual Studio to the Mac, starting with the Git Changes tool window.

Visual Studio for Mac showing a Git Changes window, with one file in a Staging area and one in a Commit Changes list.

Looking ahead to the first public preview

Our team has high standards for the quality of this release and is working on a list of known issues we want to fix before sharing out a larger public preview. These future previews will also include changes such as a new preferences UI, tool window drag and drop, and a Git branch selector in the status bar. Check out our recently updated roadmap to learn more.

Keep sending us your feedback!

We’ve been working hard to address issues developers encounter when using Visual Studio for Mac on a daily basis, with a particular focus on reducing crashes and hangs. Your bug reports are very important to us as we continue to improve the product – please keep those suggestions and problem reports coming! You can use the Help > Report a Problem or Help > Provide a Suggestion menus to share feedback, or go to the Visual Studio for Mac Developer Community site to vote for those that impact you the most.

Help shape Visual Studio 2022

Take the first steps to becoming part of the future of Visual Studio 2022 for Mac by signing up below. Once you’ve signed up, installed, and had a chance to try out the private preview, we’d love your thoughts on what we did well and how we can continue to improve.

 

59 comments

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  • Piotr Karczmarz 0

    Really exciting that VS for Mac will have fully native UI. Will it be possible to interact with UI via external API exposed for plugins integration? Like opening files in new tabs, pinning them and reordering.


    Piotr Karczmarz, CTO at ContextKeeper.io, building VS plugin allowing to instant jump to deep work via “Mental Snapshots”.

  • Shibo Wei 0

    I’ve signed up for it, and how to download the VS 2021 preview for Mac?

    • Jordan MatthiesenMicrosoft employee 0

      Thanks for signing up! Soon I’ll be emailing everyone with details to download and install.

      • Eyal Alon 0

        Hey!

        Can you tell us how soon? I still haven’t got anything.

        Thank you.

      • Silmar Sanches 0

        Jordan, I would like to receive the visual studio download link for mac 2022

        • Jordan MatthiesenMicrosoft employee 0

          Hi, all,

          I’m sending out invites today and you’ll be receiving emails soon!

          • Tomas Bohus 0

            Hi,
            I didn’t receive the email

            Thank you.

          • 晓青 田 0

            I do not receive email

          • Eyal Alon 0

            I received the first email about joining the privare preview and stuff but never the email to actually download vs.

          • Đỗ Anh 0

            Hi Jordan Matthiesen!
            The project has been stoped??? I didn’t receive any email about this!
            Best regards.,

      • 颖晟 黄 0

        Hey!

        Can you tell us how soon? I still haven’t got anything.

        Thank you.

      • rohan kandhari 0

        Hello Jordan,
        I haven’t received my invite till now ! Cam you please confirm ?
        Thanks

  • Pedro Saraiva 0

    Is this build Apple Silicon native?

    • Jordan MatthiesenMicrosoft employee 0

      Not yet, though it’s on our roadmap and we’re working on it. You are able to run the build on M1 processors, which will use the Rosetta translation technology.

      • Mario Blatarić 0

        Are Apple Silicon plans part of preview program and 2021 release or will it be postponed for later updates after initial release?
        I am asking because I have setup entire development on ARM (brew, nodejs, .net 6, tools, everything is on ARM version), so to test x64 version of Visual Studio, I also need to install all tools in x64 because VS2022 for Mac does not see nodejs, I have issues with ARM version of .NET (obviously) and so on … and I would rather not mix things up like this (VS2022 for Mac installation actually broke .NET 6 ARM by installing .NET 3.1 x64).

  • Lauri Taimila 0

    Excited about this. I’ve been using this IDE since it was ported to Mac as MonoDevelop. Always been a Mac user, but enjoy .NET at the same time. Great to see that we are finally getting native IDE for macOS.

  • Shawn Eary 0

    Where’s the GNU\Linux version?

  • Juan Lobos H. 0

    Hello, I want to congratulate you for the development of Visual Studio, because it is a good program for the development of Net applications. As a Net programmer and working with a MacPro I want to bring you some ideas for Visual Studio 2022 for Mac.

    Please correct the issue of publishing in Azure on Mac, comparing it with Visual Studio on Windows it sucks, it does not give alternatives to publish as the Windows version, for example choose platform (Windows or Linux), it has happened to me that I created a website in Azure and then the Mac version does not recognize the new site, it does not find it, instead in the windows version if there are no problems.

    To publish on Mac with Visual Studio is quite limited compared to the Windows version both in Azure and local. That is the most important thing for me, because sometimes I have to get a Windows machine to publish to Azure because the Mac version does not allow it.

    Thanks in advance.

    • saint4eva 0

      Hosting on Azure could be to Windows or Linux. However, you can develop with a Mac – using VS for Mac or VS Code – but publishing to Azure could be to Windows or Linux in Azure

  • Dhruv Kanojia 0

    Finally an update for Mac. Hopefully it’ll be a little more fluid with 2022 preview. Thanks for the hard work as always.

  • Michael John Pena 0

    I just signed up and looking forward to this! Do you have a roadmap in supporting .NET 6 and MAUI (in particular hot reload)?

  • Eyal Alon 0

    Might be a silly question but how do you sign up? I’ve completed the survey but the link always leads to SurveyMonkey.

    It’s really not clear.

    • Leszek Glinowiecki 0

      You should wait for another e-mail from MS stuff.
      Maybe beta program isn’t started yet.

      • Jordan MatthiesenMicrosoft employee 0

        Emails are being sent out today. 🙂

        • Taylor Watson 0

          Hope I’m not too late by signing up today!

    • Leszek Glinowiecki 0

      I’m waiting too.

      • Eyal Alon 0

        Thanks mate. 😉

  • Melbin Mathew 0

    Is there M1 native support?

    • Pedro Saraiva 0

      Apparently not.

      • Jordan MatthiesenMicrosoft employee 0

        Not in this build, but it is on our roadmap and we’re working on it. This build will run on M1 devices, using the Rosetta translation technology.

        • Alessandro Petrelli 0

          does “our roadmap” means “the roadmap for version 2022”? 🙂

        • Melbin Mathew 0

          I thought this was finally it for M1 and still no download link btw

  • Johan Olofsson 0

    I’ve signed up for it, and still waiting for the download link?

    • Leszek Glinowiecki 0

      You should get first e-mail about confirmation of tests.
      Another one will be with link to download or something like that.

      • Johan Olofsson 0

        Ok 👍

      • John 0

        I got a first email but it didn’t mention tests, but haven’t heard anything since.

        From the preview video and screenshots, it looks like 2022 has inherited some of the poor design choices that the current version suffers from. I thought the intention was to take design cues from VS for Windows?

        I am very happy to provide feedback once I get the opportunity to use it.

        • Jordan MatthiesenMicrosoft employee 0

          I’m looking forward to your feedback! We ran into a few really bad bugs that we’re working on fixing now and then we’ll start sending out the download link to groups of sign-ups. Please stay tuned!

          • John 0

            Thank you for letting us know Jordan! Much appreciated, and looking forward to it.

          • Johan Olofsson 0

            Thanks, looking forward to try it out

          • John 0

            Hi Jordan,
            Any idea when the next preview might be available? I gave as much feedback as I could on the first preview, but was limited by not actually being able to commit code to git. Once that is resolved I should be able to give it a good work out!

            Thanks
            John

  • Jonathan Ennin 0

    Downloaded and attempted installing it. However, I get an error – “Could not check if component is available. Can’t reach download.visualstudio.microsoft.com.”

  • Илья Андрианов 0

    When it will have CodeLens? On screenshots I don’t see this feature 🙁
    CodeLens Find references to your code

  • 明杰 任 0

    have signed up for it, still not receive email for download link yet!!!

  • Antonio Johnson 0

    Has anyone actually received the second email?

    I still haven’t seen the follow-up. I’m really excited about this and the suspense is killing me.

  • 家伟 梁 0

    I check inbox over and over again since signed up…

  • John 0

    @Jordan Mattiesen It sounds like some people have received download links, any idea when the rest of us might too? Im happy to test this as VSforMac is my primary IDE and anything to improve over the existing version is a bonus.

  • Piyush Soni 0

    This is great (especially the native UI part), but when will I be able to do native C++ development on it? Also, is Typescript development in the roadmap too? I would reeeeeeally like to use Visual Studio and go away from XCode, please.

  • Hung Phuc Ngo 0

    Would love to see the M1 version 🙂

    • Antonio Johnson 0

      It is running on my M1. So far so good.

      • Hung Phuc Ngo 0

        Do you mean vs 2022 preview ? I believe this still Intel build not M1 build

        • Antonio Johnson 0

          Yes, 2022 is still running with an Intel build, and not native. When you said M1 version, I didn’t know you were talking about native.

          It runs pretty fast overall, but yes, it will be nicer once they update it to Native. So far as I’ve been using it, I am starting to miss the Tasks window (for TODOs), as well as code lens. These are two features I realize I depend upon heavily.

  • Prashanth BC 0

    Is MAUI supported with this version of Preview for mac as it is for Windows?

  • Marian F 0

    Can’t wait to try it. Any clue when the first public preview will go live?

  • Marius Muntean 0

    Whenever I build a new dotnet MAUI app with Visual Studio for Mac 17.0 build 2626, I get the following error:
    /Users/marius/Projects/GOL.MAUI/GOL/GOL/ILLINK: Error MT2301: The linker step ‘Setup’ failed during processing: This version of Microsoft.MacCatalyst requires the MacCatalyst 15.0 SDK (shipped with Xcode 13.0). Either upgrade Xcode to get the required header files or set the managed linker behaviour to Link Framework SDKs Only in your project’s iOS Build Options > Linker Behavior (to try to avoid the new APIs). (MT2301) (GOL)

    I already installed Xcode 13 – Version 13.0 beta 5 (13A5212g)

    What can I do?

  • infix z 0

    Hi,

    Does it support mac os 10.13 ?

    thanks.

  • 国扬 李 0

    Thanks!

    Really need it so much!!!! 🤩

    by Chinese Dotnet Developer!!!

  • Johan Kvint 0

    @Jordan Are emails still being sent out? Signed up a few days ago but have not received any email yet.

  • Péter Tófalvy 0

    @Jordan, I’ve signed up for the preview with filling the survey, but how can I download the preview version?

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