Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview 7

Jordan Matthiesen

Visual Studio 2022 for Mac 17.0 Preview 7 is here and continues our focus on addressing top issues and driving forward to a high-quality GA (general availability) release. In addition to many fixes, this release brings back Xamarin mobile tooling as a supported experience and introduces Azure Functions V4 tooling which supports running on .NET 6 & M1 processors. This work continues from prior previews where we’ve moved the UI of the IDE to fully native macOS UI, running natively on Apple’s M1 (ARM 64) processor, and migrated the IDE to run on top of .NET 6. Get the latest release now by using the Visual Studio > Check for Updates… menu in the product, or download it directly:

Fixing top issues & reducing crashes

The focus of the Visual Studio 2022 v17.0 preview releases going forward is quality. We are addressing top customer reported issues on the Developer Community site as well as other top crashes that prevent developers from using and having a positive experience with the IDE. Some of the top issues fixed in this release include:

You can see the exhaustive list of fixes in the release notes.

Porting the last of the preference screens to native macOS UI

In our Preview 6 release we reached a milestone of porting the last of the major IDE UI to native macOS UI. In this preview release, we’ve finished porting the last of the Preference screens:

  • C# Code Formatting (Found in Preferences > Source Code > Code Formatting > C# source code)
  • Snippets (Found in Preferences > Text Editor > Code Snippets)
  • Behavior panels for CSS, HTML, and JSON (Found in Preferences > Text Editor > Behavior)
  • External Tools (Found in Preferences > Environment > External Tools)

The new code formatting dialog in Preview 7
The newly ported Code Formatting dialog in Visual Studio for Mac preferences.

You can learn more about the motivations of this move to native UI, by reading our Preview 1 release post. As you try out these preference screens, please let us know if you have any issues – use the Help > Report a Problem… menu in the product to share your feedback.

Support for serverless app dev on .NET 6 using Azure Functions V4

New to this release is support for developing applications using Azure Functions V4, which enables you to develop serverless apps using .NET 6. Adding support for Azure Functions V4 also enables Azure Functions development on M1 (arm64)-based processors, which required the arm64 .NET 6 SDK. In this release you can use Azure Functions V4 on Intel or M1-based machines. Azure Functions V2 & V3 projects can be opened and developed on Intel-based processors; support for creating V2 or V3 projects on Intel devices will return in an upcoming preview release.

Xamarin mobile tooling is back and ready for your feedback

In this release, we’re once again ready to get your feedback on the Xamarin mobile tooling in Visual Studio for Mac. Previously, in the Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview 6 release, we made the tough call that Xamarin tooling wasn’t ready for feedback while we were addressing known issues.

Preview 7 comes with nearly 50 bug fixes for the mobile workloads, ranging from fundamentals like fixing Android emulator creation to small papercuts like error message updates! Much of this work has been focused on Xamarin support so you can switch to 17.0 seamlessly when it goes GA, but we’re making progress with .NET MAUI too. Although we don’t plan to ship .NET MAUI support with 17.0 GA, we are making great progress towards the MAUI experience and will continue to provide updates as we get closer.

Please keep sharing your feedback

We want your help making Visual Studio 2022 for Mac the best developer experience. Your feedback continues to inform our plans – after you’ve had a chance to try out this preview, let us know what you think by taking the Visual Studio for Mac Preview survey:

Also, if you’re interested in receiving updates directly from our team, join our Preview Newsletter – we’ll share updates on what’s new and share 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.