January 25th, 2022

Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview 5

Jordan Matthiesen
Senior Product Manager

Today, we released Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview 5, marking the first Visual Studio for Mac release running on .NET 6 and natively on Appleā€™s M1 (ARM-based) processor. This change has resulted in some immediate performance wins and lays the foundation for the team to innovate more rapidly in the future. We also continued the work of moving the IDE to fully native macOS UI by upgrading more high use parts of the IDE including the Document Switcher and Document Outline. You can read all about the latest changes in the release notes. Get the latest release now by using the Visual Studio > Check for Updatesā€¦ menu, or download it directly:

Visual Studio for Mac is the IDE for .NET developers building apps for the web and cloud using ASP.NET Core, mobile using .NET or Xamarin, and Unity games on the Mac. Depending on the size of your company and what youā€™re working on, you may be eligible to use Visual Studio Community for Mac. For those with Visual Studio Subscriptions, youā€™ll find Visual Studio Professional for Mac or Visual Studio Enterprise for Mac are included in your subscription. Learn more about how to activate your Visual Studio for Mac license on our website.

.NET 6 CLR brings performance wins on both M1 & Intel processors

The move to run Visual Studio for Mac on the .NET 6 CLR is a critical investment that will allow us to take advantage of the latest innovations from .NET. One of the first benefits of moving from the Mono runtime to .NET 6 is improved performance for several scenarios granted by the new I/O implementation in .NET 6. Please note these are still early builds so you may see slightly different results, but that weā€™re continuing the investment in optimizing Visual Studio for Mac on M1 processors and would love your feedback.

More features moved to native UI: Document Switcher and Document Outline

In addition to the transition to .NET 6 weā€™re making more progress transitioning to a native MacOS UI. The entire IDE experience is now implemented in native macOS UI, where previously it was a combination of native UI and custom drawn UI controls using a non-native control library. To date weā€™ve migrated near 95% of the user experience from Visual Studio 2019 for Mac, including the editors, all commonly used tool windows, and most preferences and project settings. In Preview 5 weā€™ve continued this work by porting the Document Switcher and Document Outline window.

Dialog shown in Visual Studio for Mac when using the Ctrl+Tab shortcut. The dialog shows a list of open windows and documents.
Document Switcher (Shown when using the Ctrl+Tab shortcut to change windows)

 

Document outline for a C# file. Displays BasketService class with members expanded beneath it, such as AddItemToBasket and SetQuantities.
View > Other Windows > Document Outline for .cs files

You can learn more about the benefits that come from moving to native UI in our Preview 1 blog post where we highlight our goal with Visual Studio 2022 for Mac: to make a modern .NET IDE tailored for the Mac that delivers the productive experience youā€™ve come to love in Visual Studio.

Please keep sharing your feedback

We want your help making Visual Studio 2022 for Mac the best developer experience for you. Your feedback continues to inform our plans. If youā€™re interested in receiving updates directly from our team, join our Preview Newsletter ā€“ weā€™ll share updates on whatā€™s new and provide more opportunities for you to give feedback to our team.

Finally, please share your thoughts in our Visual Studio for Mac Preview survey, and keep sending those suggestions or 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 are most important to you.

Author

Jordan Matthiesen
Senior Product Manager

Jordan is a senior product manager working on the .NET team - focused on improving the lives of .NET devs building solutions that use AI. When not at his computer creating tools for developers, you'll find him hanging out with his family, playing guitar, or working in the garden.

30 comments

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  • nguyet trinh

    i really need C/C++ .please support them to the next update.

  • Salva Peris Gimeno

    Can I get VS2022 for Mac Preview 5 ? I’ve already installed Preview 6 but I cannot create any solution because Package Console prompts “Not connected” and Build Failed. I hope to get Preview 5 because I need it to go on working on my project.

  • danial hughes

    Great news!!!

    When will Microsoft’s Premier Development Studio (Visual Studio) on Microsoft’s Premier Supported OS (Windows) be moving to .NET 6 as well, so we can all realize the performance and benefits that .NET 6 brings?

    Thanks
    Danial

  • Michael Black

    It won’t let me go to .Net higher than 4.8 even though I have 6 installed. FAIL.

  • 先ē”Ÿ ēŽ‹

    Rosetta still needs to be installed first, which is not “native”ļ¼

  • Elangovan Manickam

    Thanks for the visual studio preview 2022 for Mac. It works great. I don’t see the MAUI project tools in this preview version. Is there any plan to add the MAUI tools support to this VS2022 preview for Mac, any time in near feature. It would be great if we get that support sooner.

  • Caeleb Xinije

    Super fast, great job! šŸ™‚

  • Š‘Š°Ń…Ń€Š°Š¼ Š‘Š°Š¹Ń€Š°Š¼Š·Š°Š“Šµ

    I really need C++ in Visual Studio 2022 for Mac OS! Please add C++ support to the next version of Visual Studio 2022.

    • Erik Martines Sanches

      I agree, please add C++.

  • Andrey Philippov · Edited

    Bugs related to android projects.
    1. New VS sometimes crashing when trying to run and connect debugger to android emulator.
    2. For me I can't even open Device Manager window. I click the button and nothing happens
    3. After some period of time working with android project, i mean many times of building/cleaning/running/managing resources, VS starts thinking and freezing on every action. It significantly break down performance. Restart of VS helps. I've been facing with...

    Read more
    • Bruno Jorge

      I’m having the issue when running and debugging to android device from the VS for Mac 2022 (Version 17.0 build 6509).