Visual Studio for Mac Retirement Announcement
Today we are announcing the retirement of the Visual Studio for Mac IDE. Visual Studio for Mac 17.6 will continue to be supported for another 12 months, until August 31st, 2024, with servicing updates for security issues and updated platforms from Apple. While the decision has been made to retire Visual Studio for Mac, we remain committed to our developers on Mac with alternatives like the recently announced C# Dev Kit for VS Code and other extensions that will allow you to take advantage of our ongoing investments in .NET development on a Mac.
Developing Across OS Environments
Informed by ongoing user feedback and usage patterns for Visual Studio for Mac, we’re focusing our efforts on optimizing Visual Studio, accessible through Microsoft Dev Box on any operating system, and the C# Dev Kit for VS Code, which is accessible on any OS.
What does this retirement announcement mean for existing users?
With today’s announcement, we’re redirecting our resources and focus to enhance Visual Studio and VS Code, optimizing them for cross-platform development. No new framework, runtime, or language support will be added to Visual Studio for Mac. For the next 12 months, however, we will continue providing essential updates such as servicing updates for critical bug fixes, security issues, and updated platforms from Apple. 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. We hope with these commitments and the investment in the alternatives below, we can minimize the disruption to your workflow on the Mac.
When will Visual Studio for Mac cease to be supported?
Visual Studio for Mac will no longer be supported starting August 31st, 2024. On that date, Visual Studio for Mac will be available as a legacy installation only via my.visualstudio.com for users with Visual Studio subscriptions but will no longer be serviced or maintained. If you have any support agreements, you will continue to have access to technical support until August 31st, 2024.
What options do I have instead of Visual Studio for Mac?
There are several alternative solutions to using Visual Studio for Mac:
Visual Studio Code with the new C# Dev Kit and related extensions: The recently announced C# Dev Kit, .NET MAUI, and Unity Extensions for VS Code are available in preview and are intended to augment VS Code’s capabilities for .NET and C# developers. These extensions operate natively across all supported platforms, including macOS, and the experience using these will continue to be improved as they move from preview to GA and beyond.
Visual Studio IDE running on Windows in a VM on Mac: This option will cover the broadest IDE needs such as legacy project support for Xamarin, F#, and remote development experiences on iOS by using a virtual machine (VM).
Visual Studio IDE running on Windows in a VM in the Cloud: Visual Studio continues to be the premier tool of choice for .NET/C# development. A Cloud hosted VM from Microsoft Dev Box provides access to the full power of VS through your Web or native RDP client from a Mac without the overhead of running a virtual machine on your local machine.
Share your Feedback!
We’d like to thank all of you for your support shaping Visual Studio for Mac and for being a valued part of the Visual Studio community. We are committed to our developers on the Mac and want your feedback to shape our future investments in C# Dev Kit, .NET MAUI, and Unity Extensions for VS Code, and Microsoft Dev Box.
Anthony Cangialosi
Group Product Manager | Developer Division
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214 comments
Not unexpected and we on Uno team hope its for the better. Thanks for many years of service! Go Dev Kit, go. Looking forward to supporting / leveraging C# Dev Kit in the future from our VS Code plugin . Sasha.
MSFT should never put the VS brand on it. It was the cr@py Xamarin Studio that was just renamed to VS for Mac. I know they tryed to rewrite it from scratch recently but it was always the same half backed IDE full of bug and way way less powerfull in terms of development features compared to VS 2022 on Windows.
I think it’s a good decision to switch resources and investments to VS 2022 and VS Code. Hopping they succeed and one they they can make the full VS 2022 to run everywhere just like Rider does now, so nobody will complain and just use a full fledged IDE on Windows, Mac and Linux.
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“Cross platform development” my a$$.
What a slap in the face to mac developers, we already were getting shafted not having full VS and now we don’t get an IDE period. VS Code with C# plugin is NOT a replacement for an IDE.
I’m just going to move to Rider and be done with it. Microsoft embracing EEE once again everyone.
Yep, instead of giving us a full fledged IDE they decided to put in half the effort then give up entirely. Absolutely shameful. This could’ve been their golden opportunity to sell a full fledged Visual Studio product on macOS to compete with Xcode (which honestly isn’t all that great) and Rider. Now I’m switching to Rider to do everything because it looks and feels more like Visual Studio than Visual Studio for Mac ever did.
What a failure this company has become over the years.. one flop after another.
Oh well.
defo switch to rider hope you have a better experience with it then miserable Microsoft which as we all know is just a waste of space.
Jetbrains Rider is so much better than Visual Studio anyway. I don’t miss anything about Visual Studio since switching.
VS for Mac has always been behind. I’m not sad to see it go. I switched to Rider on the Mac a long time ago and never looked back.
LOL….MS tries to support cross-platform development for years and still does to some extent.
Meanwhile Apple does everything they possibly can to prevent us from developing for their platforms on anything but their proprietary systems.
Yet, MS is the bad guy, here.
SMH….
I spent Thursday and Friday trying to get a simple maui app that I wrote to load and run under vscode and the Maui extension. Never could get it to work. Bought Rider, and it popped right up. Vscode is not an ide that we are looking for.
It has some build and config issues, as reported on the Github site.
I also spent two days but finally could get it to work via editing msbuild config files and vscode json launch files.
But I agree. It is quite buggy as it is.
VS Code + Dev Kit is awesome, It made me switch to VS Code even on my windows machine.
I’m not sure I’d say “awesome”. I’ve seen and had many issues with trying to use this, from not loading projects, to just not working at all. You can’t call this a replacement, if it doesn’t work.
The switch to VS code worked for me in my second try, The first one was a year ago (Here I wrote about that: https://stackoverflow.com/a/73400016/6339469). After C# dev kit and VS code server I give it another chance and now after 2 month I’m happy with that.
Although I missed some features of VS (the top one is IntelliSense in debug console), there are many advantages like: remote development ( that means your cheap and light laptop can perform like a server!), more customization space, being lighter and faster, portability, richer community (means a lot)
Yep. Gotta agree. This is pretty lame. “Here Mac users! We have a new update of Visual Studio! It’s it awesome!. PSYCHE! Fool you!”
As somebody deep into making a complex MAUI app, this concerns me. VSCode is nice and all, but it’s not a full IDE no matter how many extensions you install. The MAUI extension is far from being a replacement. While I primarily develop on Windows, this move makes me question if MAUI will survive.
You would be wise to question MAUI. I once built a large enterprise Silverlight app and had to rewrite the entire thing when MS does what it always does. I have used Xamarin since the beginning but refused to adopt Xamarin Forms and will not adopt MAUI for this reason. MS WILL kill MAUI. It’s just a matter of time. They will not have any sympathy for you when they do it.
this is also another dotnet product goes to die, and now js/ts and electorn is now the “native” apps on windows acorrding to docs https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/get-started/?tabs=rnw%2Ccpp-win32,
I saw many MS is reduce the resource on .net and add more on rust and java
Given that MAUI depends on WinUI, I would seriously consider something else.
There is no change to our investment in MAUI. the .NET team is releasing many .NET MAUI updates in .NET 8. We understand the extension is not a replacement for a full IDE, but we are continuing to invest in making it a great experience.
There is no change to our investment in MAUI yet. Your words mean nothing …
The real problem is when they stop talking. The latest post on the VB Blog is ‘Visual Basic support planned for .NET 5.0’, posted on March 11th, 2020.
The later VB annoucement can be found [here](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/update-to-the-dotnet-language-strategy/). Basically if you read the post, comments and linked documents the word is that VB is supported but only in maintenance mode except where it causes problems for C# and then they’ll make change.
Thanks for the reply. Can you understand where I’m coming from though? I know the VS and MAUI teams are separate, but from a high level, not investing in professional Mac development tools looks bad for MAUI. Microsoft should do something to make it clear that MAUI investment and support isn’t changing or risk MAUI devs jumping ship.
Seasoned developers know this means nothing. This is what MS does and always does. Invent a shiny new toy for developers, encourage all developers to use the new toy, maybe even make it difficult for developers to use the old toy, and then MS drops the new toy only to unveil another shiny new toy. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. And if a company invested $1M and two years developing a big MAUI project they will be left high and dry. It’s the nature of MS.
Sorry to hear it @AnthonyCangialosi!
It’s such a shame that you guys quit when it was finally getting good. I have moved to the Mac because it’s just a better laptop that what everyone else is offering and I could actually do my work well with no more problems what so ever.
This news really sucks! Sorry to have to move to Rider after 12 years of Visual Studio … 12 years dude!
You (Microsoft PMs) said exactly the same thing about VS4MAC on the last community call, do you want the exact timeline for the Q&A section?
I am seriously concerned where the future of Maui lies!! The product is full of serious bugs Still today with net8 latest I cannot launch my app.I can launch hello world . You mention investment is Maui .what investment the team is so small and can’t cope .why can’t you be transparent and tell us now if you are going to silverlight us!! Evolution what evolution is a nightmare and like it was mentioned in twitter by ex employee Miguel Icaza “ineffective Leadership “. I have full respect for the actual Maui dev who are in an impossible situation but management is shitshow. Why is it that the people that actually make the decision are hiding and the pms have to face the music!! Where are we going with MAUI!!!’Many jobs depend on it !! Do you care? We are professional mobile dev who invested in Microsoft product and now we feel so vulnerable.. will you reply let’s see
There is no change to our investment in MAUI.
And that is part of the problem. The Xamarin devs are gone, the MAUI team is too small, WinUI is years in and in even worse shape. Microsoft needs to increase its commitment. The current state is brink of death 🙁
Or else, just pull the plug now and invest resources to migrating people to Blazor, Uno or Avalonia.
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“For now.”
Investment in MAUI should mean to be fully committed to actively develop and support it at least 10 years from now, on all 4 platforms: Windows, Android, Mac and iOS and to make it the main framework for desktop applications in .NET.
Otherwise, it will just be an abandoned technology like WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, UWP etc..
MonoDevelop turned into ha**-a**ed Xamarin Studio turned into ha**-a**ed VS for Mac failed
oh noooo, who could ever see this coming?!
Then I suppose you’ll be bringing back the the iOS Designer that was deprecated in VS 2019 16.8?
Since it was from MonoDevelop, why not just release the source code for the community to take care of?
Because they can’t push VS subscriptions on you.
They weren’t making enough money on VS for Mac. Now they want you to pay a full VS license to use a text editor plugin.
> use a text editor plugin
If that’s all you need, why exactly are you complaining in the comments when there’s VSCode? 🤔
He’s TALKING about VSCode,
That it’s not true.
If you want to use a text editor you can use VS Community or VS Code for free.
Taylor is referring to the C# Dev Kit extension of VSCode („text editor plugin“).
As you may not know, currently the C# Dev Kit is free because its in the beta phase BUT this will change once it get released and Microsoft wants to monetize the „plugin“ which in Taylor‘s opinion should not happen because its only a „text editor plugin“.
You may want to read the comments about the C# Dev Kit to get more info about the license necessary once C# Dev Kit will reach GA.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/announcing-csharp-dev-kit-for-visual-studio-code/
There is a whole drama around this topic, that Microsoft allegedly forked Omnisharp plugin only to be able to give it a price tag. So they took advantage of the open source nature of the project, without giving back to the open source project.
Just to clarify here — the C# Dev Kit uses the same license as Community as well — free for personal, open source, academic usage. Additionally the core language extension is still open source.
(there is no reply button, for Tim Heuers comment, so I am replying to my own)
@TimHeuer
IMHO as long as there is no feature chart explaining exactly which feature is behind a (paid) VS license and which isn’t, the topic will remain the extension isn’t free – as we simply don’t know what exactly is to be paid for
so do yourself a favor do a new blogpost and explain it precisely, you should have realized by now, there is a misunderstanding that needs to be cleared
“There are several alternative solutions to using Visual Studio for Mac:”
You forgot the most appealing option: JetBrains Rider
Even on Windows, I haven’t used VS in 2 or 3 years
Yea, so many .NET developers think MS is the only IDE provider. I love Rider and would hate to ever go back to Visual Studio.
Because for .NET developers that are actually Windows/Azure developers, there are still several things missing, specially when comparing with VS Ultimate.
Additionally many .NET already paid for MSDN licenses, more likely their employer did, so getting Rider is paying twice.
I know that Rider is your competitor (that you try to undermine with shady actions like closed source debugger and hot reload controversy), but not mentioning it in “What options do I have instead of Visual Studio for Mac?” section while not having good alternative sounds bad. “C# Dev Kit” is promising but very new and not mature yet as full IDE replacement.
Jetbrains thanks you for your contribution to their Rider market share.
Let’s be real… this was never a great IDE.
That said, if you could please stop making a buzz about things only to drop them a year later, that would be great. People and business make long term decisions regarding products and frameworks based on what you are pushing. If there is no confidence that something you push will be around after a year, how could anyone ever comfortably choose to use your products and frameworks? It’s not just this either, I am having similar issues with Node packages published by Microsoft. I am dealing with incomplete functionality, tickets closed unresolved, and documentation that covers only the most basic, “hello world” use cases… it’s very frustrating. My confidence in Microsoft’s product stability and support has been degrading quickly over the past few months, and this does not help. I hope this is constructive.
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This announcement would make sense if VS had become multi-platform or VS Code had been substantially improved. In the absence of that, it seems like this risks burning the bridges with non-Windows devs so many at MS have worked hard to build the past 10 years.
MS brass is really gambling by these deep cuts to Dev Div. Dev Div products are a major driver of users towards Azure. Seems a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
This combined with that new C# Dev Kit extension for VSCode seems to be pointing to a planned decommissioning of Visual Studio itself. We were already in a situation where vendors were favoring VSCode for new extensions etc (things would be developed first for VSCode, and then later (or never) for Visual Studio).
Would be nice if Microsoft could share their plans with consumers and be more transparent about it. I don’t want to waste more time with a product if said product is confirmed to become obsolete soon.
@Anthony, any thoughts you could share in this direction?
The Visual Studio IDE is still our premier C# development tool that support all of our .NET workloads and project types and isn’t going anywhere. VS 2022 has brought major improvements like a 64-bit IDE, an ARM64 version of VS, a completely new Git experience, a new semantic search experience, & perf enhancement to scale with the largest solutions in the world to name a few that I’m personally proud of and there is plenty more coming in 17.8 and beyond.
Just the fact that it’s taken this long to get Visual Studio fully into the 64 bit world tells us that you obviously have no intention of investing in it in any real sense. Lets just rip the band aid off and scrap it before customers make any further commitment to it.
>> Just the fact that it’s taken this long to get Visual Studio fully into the 64 bit world tells us that you obviously have no intention of investing in it in any real sense.
Interesting viewpoint. For those of us who maintain very large code bases AND have 100s or 1000s of users who have customized it such that making a big change from x86 to x64 would literally break everything then this seems like a shortsighted response. Making such a switch: 1) only really helps if you have a process using a lot of memory (which VS does), and 2) is worth breaking everybody who has any third party extensions for it. Huge costs and risks. I believe MS has been putting in the hooks for years to get extensions to be .NET based so the platform wouldn’t matter but that takes years. They have also been moving lots of things out of process to reduce memory and help isolate things in case of errors. The switch to x64 was painful (anyone switching from Win16 to Win32 understands that) and took a lot of time and effort. There are still issues people are finding.
So we’re just SOL as far as running Xamarin.Forms apps on an iOS simulator?
Xamarin support ends on May 1, 2024, so technically VS for Mac will be supported for at least as long as Xamarin is. Beyond that, you would need to continue using an unsupported VS for Mac version to build an app on unsupported Xamarin.
Come on you can’t leave in the past forever. Xamarin EOF was announced a long time ago.
You should consider migrating to .NET MAUI sooner or later anyway
PS.: I would not recommend migrating to MAUI now, MAUI 7 is still very buggy, but definetly consider doing it on November when MAUI 8 goes GA.
How do you develop on Maui for MacOS. Need a good document on how to build there niw without VS for Mac.
The Maui extension for vscode is not very good. I recommend against it. I spent Thursday and Friday trying to get it to work and gave up. I installed rider and everything just popped up, worked, and I could debug.
This does not surprise me at all. I heard they laid off most of the team back in February.
But this trend is bad for .NET developers. Microsoft’s lack of commitment to anything platform related (.NET MAUI, WinUI, .NET for iOS, .NET for Android, etc) has really shown in the last several years. Less features, more bugs, smaller support teams.
If it does not funnel loads of money into Azure, it’s second class. And Visual Studio for Mac was mostly about Xamarin.
Not to mention the declining quality in VS itself. Each release is buggier than the last. I’m guessing they don’t have an internal testing team for that anymore either.
It is actually worse than that. I’ve loved the msft products and their developer tools for years, but I’ve lost interest in them over the last couple of years. I knew a guy that worked at msft and floated between Seattle and a regional office. He told me that msft developer products doesn’t really understand why they need to have a developer products group. Sounds strange. He said that Seattle doesn’t understand how any needs anything besides some wizards to whip some things up in a few minutes.
I was a huge fan of xamarin when they came out. I guess it’s death is now complete.
What a joke!
So after promising on several community updates that VSCode wasn’t going to take over Visual Studio for Mac, you do exactly what many of us were telling it was going to happen!
Stop trying to pretend .NET is cross platform, when it is obvious all platforms beyond Windows get 2nd or 3rd class tooling support.
I don’t see why this would be a problem.
At the meantime, most cross-platform development platforms even yet to have an official IDE and they have to reply on JetBrains IDEs or a 1st/3rd party VSCode extension.
Java doesn’t.
There are at least three big alternatives, all written in Java itself.
C and C++ don’t, equally several alternatives exist, with QtCreator and KDevelop, being the best if talking about crossplatform tooling, written in C++.
A rare .NET/Xamarin Native developer passing by. Does it mean no more support for the XIB-based workflow? Or will you bring the .designer.cs Xcode project sync to VS Code?
Yes, I too would like to know this. This is pretty disappointing as I have been developing a Xamarin-based application since 2015, and now it looks like my business partner and I need to abandon our (admittedly not numerous) macOS-based customers. It’s not financially feasible to redevelop our app natively for Mac; we have core C# financial calculation code that is shared across Windows and web.
I’m also a .NET/Xamarin Native developer. I guess I’ll be forced to look into rider now. I have several successful iOS projects built on the technology. Thankfully I never adopted Xamarin Forms or MAUI. I learned my lesson from Silverlight. When MS purchased Xamarin I knew this day would come.
MAUI uses Blazor or XAML, which makes it easier to port an existing Blazor or WinUI App to MAUI. I think it’s better than learning Swift.
My team switched to Rider a while back and it is a viable alternative with full XIB support via Xcode sync (just as VS for Mac did). There are some quirk, but in general, Rider is just a better experience than VS for Mac was.
That being said, I am curious to know what are Microsoft plans regarding this too. In the long run, it seems to look bad for the future of .NET development on macOS.
“…it is a viable alternative with full XIB support via Xcode sync”
Thanks for this, Xavier, I will look into Rider as an alternative.
We’re going to bring Xcode sync to VS Code – VS Code is generally much nicer about file watching too, so the experience is already pretty good!
Thanks for the reply and info, Maddy.
Thank you!!!
So what’s going to happen for those of us who need VS for Mac on a build agent so we can run pipeline builds of our Xamarin iOS apps?
Like everyone else, we’re probably just going to have to switch to a different IDE and deal with it, but DevOps pipeline builds will continue to be an issue for us. Or have you not thought about that? Are we simply going to be forced to try and build with something different? So our entire app pipeline will need to be rebuilt as well before the next year is out?
FFS this sucks. We have enough crap to deal with already due to all the constantly shifting goalposts from MS, Apple, Google and others.
The build and publish functionality is one of the reasons Visual Studio on Mac is good, in many regards even better than VC on PC. Visual Studio Code is a JSON settings clunky infection mess. They need to work on that A LOT!
Same too with the clear and easy ability to manage and update dependencies and packages.
yes, I am also very interested in knowing the implications towards mac build agents for xamarin and maui. I do understand xamarin will be out of support by then, but what about maui? how are we supposed to set up build agents without visual studio?
You’ve never needed VS to make a build agent. All the build tools are installable on their own independent of the IDE.
Wrong in this case. The documentation for setting up a Mac build agent that supports Xamarin builds simply says “You must install VS for Mac”. I’m paraphrasing but the exact documentation that clearly states this requirement is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/ecosystems/xamarin?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml#set-up-xamarin-tools
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Build agents has nothing to do with the IDE, they are independent stuffs. So build agents will continue to work.
As I said in my reply to Chris Robison above, that’s incorrect actually.
The documentation for setting up a Mac build agent that supports Xamarin builds simply says “You must install VS for Mac”. I’m paraphrasing but the exact documentation that clearly states this requirement is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/ecosystems/xamarin?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml#set-up-xamarin-tools
The documentation says that “If you’re using a self-hosted agent, install either of the following tools: Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin for Windows agents, Visual Studio for Mac for macOS agents”.
However, in Azure Pipelines, Microsoft offers agents with preinstalled tools. In the case of macOS, they offer the following:
https://github.com/actions/runner-images/blob/main/images/macos/macos-11-Readme.md#xamarin
https://github.com/actions/runner-images/blob/main/images/macos/macos-12-Readme.md#xamarin
https://github.com/actions/runner-images/blob/main/images/macos/macos-13-Readme.md
macOS 11 and macOS 12 support Xamarin tools via Visual Studio for Mac, so it’s true you need it for Xamarin.
macOS 13 doesn’t have VS for Mac, only the .NET SDKs, so this is enough for .NET MAUI projects.
@Jorge Morales Vidal it’s true that MS provide agents that have preinstalled tools. HOWEVER, there are many, MANY reasons that those might not suit. In our case, they do not, and we have our own agents.
Make no mistake here – I *KNOW* what I’m talking about with this, and this move from Microsoft is an unmitigated disaster for me and my team. We’re stuck with an old Xamarin iOS app, that we DO intend to upgrade to MAUI but lets be clear: Non-VS support for MAUI is even WORSE than Non-VS support for Xamarin. On top of that, we can’t just say, purely because MS have announced end-of-life on VS for Mac, that we’re going to spend the next year doing nothing but migrating our apps to MAUI. That’s NOT a smart business move.
That’s why I feel hung out to dry by MS on this. There was no indication this was coming, we have no good alternative for it and, to put it bluntly, this has f–ked us over.
DevOps pipelines should be fine, you can do all the same things in the pipeline with the build host just via CLI – we’re also going to make sure existing Azure DevOps Mac build hosts have the correct things you need.
Thanks Maddy, but as I’ve mentioned already in replying to others here, for a number of reasons, the company I work for uses self hosted build agents. We are also on Xamarin currently, and whilst a move to MAUI is (or rather, until this news about VS for Mac, *was*) on the cards, we can’t make this move any time soon due to current workload, project priorities and the size and complexity of the codebase.
We *need* to be able to continue to use our self hosted build agents for the foreseeable future, and that means we need to keep using VS for Mac for longer than the next 12 months!!
Microsoft is always like this… please, use WebForms, use MVC, use Razor, use VStudio, then change everything and you have to write everything again. Use VS Code to after some time make everything obsolete again? it makes no sense to have a Mac to use a VM with Windows to use VStudio.
Appalling. First you guys all get on the “must use native controls” bandwagon and so make real crossplatform dev insanely difficult. Then Xamarin sort of vaguely supports macOS then never releases it. Then they switch to MacCatalyst which is basically iOS on macOS (so much for ‘native controls’). Then we get MAUI, WinUI 2 and WinUI 3 (which are fairly different) and none of which are WPF compatible OR crossplatform and Blazor which is sort of SilverLight Mk 2 but isn’t a full app platform. And then there’s UWP or is it XAML Islands now?
Could you guys pick ONE bloody direction and stick to it until it’s complete and works?
And I was just getting used to developing WPF compliant apps for macOS using Avalonia UI which IS almost 100% WPF compatible AND true-crossplatform.
Fortunately they support JetBrains Rider and since it IS crossplatform (unlike Microsoft’s options) I can dev on Windows and then tweak in macOS where necessary.
But seriously… this mess is a joke.
In some ways developers are the reason for this. Developers are always chasing the newest shiny object. Always. MS is more than happy to give them another shiny object to chase. The product managers for MS need to stop being so naive about the grandiose plans their developers are selling them, maintain focus, and act like they actually respect the time and effort all of us are investing in their technologies.
This started when Azure became the new baby and most new Microsoft employees have no clue about the old developers x 3 culture.
What do you think of Avalonia? Im on Xamarin and need to move to something.
Sad, since it was finally getting to a point where it was usable. Going to look for another cross-platform framework as well then, since the IDE for MAUI has been axed, it’s probably next..
It is a dumb decision.
If your going to offer a solution you need to do it properly. Yes you have a year but you need to do some work.
The problem with visual studio code is that you shove everything into “Manual” labour, especially for MAC users. Some like to run commands all day long, I do as well but having to make crazy complex JSON files to do anything is just super annoying.
Visual Studio for Mac when it came to debug and build for a dotnet core project for example.
– You configure your project with launch settings and appsettings. Appsettings with different environments.
– The top bar is very simple but very clear and useful. It picks up the options and has your target browser options right there for you automatically
– The run and debug is just straight forward
– The publish options are right there, simple UI and quick to do
– Dependancies and packages have clear update indicators right there in the tree and easy to manage and update
– Nuget package manager is way better than on VSC
I like VSC for coding actual lines of code way better for many reasons but the intelisense experience on mac is just still clunky, slower and when you have overloads for example more of a pain to use as well.
I use VS on mac for the management, build and publish side because of the better UI management experience and the time saving it offers.
You need to do a lot of work on the UI of Visual Studio Code not just for Mac and Linux users but especially for them to have a better experience. You can not just shoehorn features into JSON settings files and ever increasing complicated command lines.
This is exactly our use case for VS Code. Nice, useful and straightforward for debugging, building, and publishing iOS apps using Xamarin (and soon MAUI?). It is also very good for working with ASP.NET Core projects and Web APIs.
VS Code, even with these new half-baked extensions, is nowhere near ready and I doubt it will be in a year. Pushing people back to VS for Windows just feels like a lazy move by Microsoft.
This is a bad and precipitated decision that will cause a lot of damage to people’s faith on Microsoft’s commitment to anything but development on VS for Windows.
Wanted to follow up on this comment now that I have been using VS Code + MAUI + C# DevKit Extensions to push forward on our migration of a 7-year-old XF app.
It’s actually kind of nice, once you get into the groove the experience is quite good. Editing and refactoring code, going through build/deploy/debug cycles works fairly well and is responsive on both my Windows and MBP laptops. The main glaring spots are managing nuget dependencies (been mainly editing the .csproj manually) and packaging for the stores (which I have not done and expect to have to use the platform specific tools).
So, if they keep working on those extensions and add better CLI tooling for nuget dependency management I think this could be a good path forward. It also has the added benefit of being largely the same no matter what platform you’re working on (have not tested on Linux though).
VSC isn’t a IDE, no matters how justifications or how many plug-ins it has, is an text editor. Make no mistake, that is the path, the next target is the visual studio itself. Microssoft in a burst off dumbness will kill it. Will loose the .net coders platform to aim other developers communities…. and then these other communities will find another text editor more fancy with better plugins, with better experience on debug and configurations…. then they lose everything. We are in the 21st century, code in text editors should not be acceptable.
could you guys open source it and let community maintain it ? I understand a competing product like VS Code is also suitable to many linux devs , but Visual Studio gives an unique experience to C# devs who are used to this tool…
It’s really confusing to see what Visual Studio for Mac have developed. From Xamarin Studio to the 2019 version, they were actually the MonoDevelop versions.
For 2022, I am glad to see it has been developed natively for macOS, and be universal (For both Intel chip Macs and the Silicon ones).
Then the Visual Studio for Mac IDE was finally canceled.
Visual Studio Code is a good code editor, however, it is not an IDE with full functions.
You should know that we developers need an IDE instead of a powerful code editor with the xxx tookits (plugins).
screw you guys! I bet .NET MAUI is next
What are the options for Catalyst app?
Does VS Code supports .NET Catalyst (not MAUI) deploy & debug? Or Rider? I have an app to support.
Yes – the .NET MAUI extension works with native .NET Catalyst (and iOS etc) apps!
It doesn’t appear to work for me, even on a Mac. Retiring VS for Mac should have been done AFTER VS Code reached some level of feature parity.
Sounds like step #1 in the death announcement for Visual Studio as a whole. VScode is a fine editor which doesn’t lock you in to .NET and combined with the ever evolving Github, covers all your needs, almost always in better ways than Visual Studio does. Time to join the rest of the world .NET devs – welcome!
I find it worrying that you’re retiring a working product with its successors merely being “in preview”. I can see us right now in a year struggling to somehow keep our development on Mac going because the VS Code solution is still in preview or missing crucial features (or abandoned altogether for the next shiny thing).
Very disappointed right now – we’ll have to rethink our investment in the MS development platform given how flaky it has become in the last years.
And your options basically boil down to “use Windows somehow”. Sorry, that’s laughable.
Hello. If you plan to make Visual Studio Cover better, this will benefit everyone. You have already made the licensing for full C# experience similar to Visual Studio for Windows. So, it’s paid now and we can expect a better experience. All good.
But please, all this talk about VM should not be pushed as a recommended option. This can only be a workaround, got when you cannot use actual OS, like .NET Framework development.
Not even a VM in the cloud. That’s worse, but better.
Jetbrains is opening champagne right now!!!! Luckily we have super Rider!!!
Visual Studio has a free version, Rider does not.
So Rider is never going to be an option for me.
Can you explain why it should be free? Is it just because VS Community Edition is or what? It’s ridiculous and its not even expensive.
Rider does have a free version, with an asterisk. It is free for students, teachers, and open source projects.
And on top of that, it is a java app… I will never in my life ever install java runtime on my PC..
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The community edition only covers companies with a revenue under $1 Mill USD, which is, companies with < 10 employees.
Or open source projects, which Rider is free for too, so… ?
I’ve never used VS Mac for development, so this is great to hear! Using VS on Windows with a remote connection to OSX has been working flawlessly for me.
However, I have a question. Given that Microsoft will likely free up some hours from the team that was working on VS for Mac, could these hours be allocated to work on MAUI?
Right, so your attitude is “hey *I* don’t need it, so screw everyone who DOES”??? Come on man! There are use cases where devs require VS for Mac. Just because YOU don’t need it doesn’t mean it’s not needed!
I’ve been using Xamarin.Forms since around 2016-2017. I’ve rarely needed to use OSX as my primary development platform, except in instances where I faced compilation issues or needed to work directly with xib files. This translates to roughly once a week, to about 1-3 times a month tops.
Since around 2017, I’ve had several private build agents based on Apple hardware to compile apps for Apple devices..
For me, VS for Mac has never been up to par. Instead of constantly grappling to find a more efficient way to develop Xamarin-based applications directly on Apple’s OS, I’ve opted for what I find to be a more user-friendly platform: Windows + VS for Windows.
When MS released an updated version of VS for Mac, I was taken aback. I’d hoped they had decided to fine-tune it into a solid development software for Apple’s OS. So, when I finally installed the updated VS for Mac, I couldn’t help but laugh.
My primary concern is whether MS will allocate more resources and dedication towards the development of MAUI. Xamarin.Forms was always a headache; the community often faced challenges even with smaller applications. While MAUI shows promise, despite being “released” for roughly a year, it still feels more like a preview or alpha version. The pressing question for me is: will I be able to transition my projects to MAUI, or is it time to explore other cross-platform SDKs?
P.S. I’m a supporter of the Right-To-Repair movement. Thus, I never purchase Apple-based hardware for personal use. I also don’t intend to use this platform for work, unless absolutely compelled, as long as Windows or Linux-based OS options are available.
Good on you – once again you demonstrate an attitude of “I do it like this so everyone else should also”. That’s not the reality for most people, my friend. I don’t use a Mac for primary dev either – I hate Apple with a passion. But I also accept that I *do* need to use their stuff on occasion *because the company I work for needs me to*. I work on a team of devs who support a cross platform application suite which includes a Xamarin solution for iOS and Android/Chromebook. This means we need to use VS for Mac to build it, and this solution was in place well before I, and most of my current dev team, started working on it. So we’re stuck with it.
We have a backlog of work that will EASILY span more than a year just for the most critical work, so we have no bandwidth to suddenly take a right turn, as it were, and deal with migrating off Xamarin and VS for Mac. In short, this is a nightmare for us.
Now, I understand that you don’t understand that, but it sounds like you are just in a completely different situation and that’s ok. Just take the time to realize that YOUR situation is not EVERYONE ELSES situation also, ok?
Since you are retiring it, could you opensource it and leave it to the community to develop/ improve?
+ at least make it support future versions of dotnet like NET8 lts that will be released in November?
that would be a nice goodbye gift
I’m a bit disappointed by the management of this tool. But I understand the decision. There is no demand for it.
My excitement for VS for Mac wore off as I saw that it wasn’t going to reach the same level as its Windows-equivalent.
VS Code is now as good or in some cases better for the things that I do. So why having so many tools when you need just one good editor with a working debugger?
Shucks there goes my .NET Framework update tool!
The only time I ever opened VS 4 Mac was to update my .NET frameworks!
Been using Rider from Jetbrains for 2 years, paying annual license fees so that I DON”T have to use. VS 4 Mac.
It seems those complaining are the ones trying to do native app development using a non-native technology. Which is always a dangerous thing to do. I find VS Code to be adequate for quite a large number of tasks (on my old Macbook Pro as well), but I mainly build command line tools and web applications. None of which are really that dependent on a fully fledged IDE.
Native? No, but I have a Xamarin iOS app that I inherited, which is critical to my company’s business. MS have advertised Xamarin (and now MAUI) as THE goto cross platform app framework for .net devs for LITERALLY decades, and now suddenly, with no warning, they’re sunsetting a tool that is critical to success with that framework. WTF.
Mark, anything deployed to iOS is native by definition. Web app of course being the alternative. Microsoft history is full of sunsetting so it shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s just the way things happen when a technology isn’t critical to a company’s success. Consider iOS as the counter example. It is critical to Apple’s success. It’s native technology, Swift, is going to be there as long as iOS continues to be critical to Apple’s success which in all likelyhood will continue for years to come (decades?). By using any other technology you may gain an initial speed advantage but in the long run you will expose yourself to a huge risk, unless you plan from the start to move over to the preferred technology as your business model becomes successful.
so, as my guess MAUI is going to die soon?
You guessed it from reading comments? FYI those are only rumours 😉
This is dumb mov. Why in the universe Microsoft insit on push people to use text editor with plug-ins? They aren’t capable to learn with the mistakes of other that try it? Why we are supose to go back to code like it was done 40 yers ago? IDE exist for a reason and the expectation is to get more visual studio IDE cross platform. How long until they decide to retire or stop Visual Studio on windows as well? Microsoft is incapable of learn with its own mistakes aparently silverligth, windows phone, and others many bad decisions arent enouth to show then the way. Make what is working better, cross platform and don’t mess with developers environment.
This is extremely disappointing and will make a lot of folks question Microsoft’s commitment to the Mac as a development platform and to MAUI by association. Sure VS for Mac could be flaky, but it had come a long way over the past few years and I actually liked the fact that it was simpler / less cluttered than VS for Windows. Like others here I wish Microsoft could come out and state their long term plans because this way of releasing updates is going to hurt you in the long run.
I was hopingVS for Mac will pave the way to VS for Linux, but it seems that once again, M$ is trying to go all EEE on competing OSs. Well, I’ll just use Rider on Linux and avoid like the plague the dumpster fire that is M$ Windows, while also avoiding other M$ products.
JetBrains IDEs are amazing – but can we interactively build out XAML UIs and debug? And how do we convince a large corporation to embrace a new IDE just to support a relatively few Mac users? This announcement is very troubling. I wish Apple would at least articulate some commitment to .NET on Mac, and to providing some sort of UI framework (Maui still needs a LOT of work of course… for serious app development – but it seemed off to a reasonable start).
JetBrains IDEs are amazing – but can we interactively build out XAML UIs and debug? And how do we convince a large corporation to embrace a new IDE just to support a relatively few Mac users? This announcement is very troubling. I wish Apple would at least articulate some commitment to .NET on Mac, and to providing some sort of UI framework (Maui still needs a LOT of work of course… for serious app development – but it seemed off to a reasonable start).
Is the announcement saying that I can now create a Mac package from Visual Studio for Windows? That would be fantastic… though how to debug?
If Visual Studio for Mac must be discontinued, it should be after support for .NET 8 has been added.
.NET 8 is the next long term servicing version of the framework. Even if the IDE is not getting support, it would be valuable for an extra three years for commercial users because it can compile and deploy using the latest SDK.
If it’s a financing issue supporting multiple IDE’s, then remove all the proprietary components and open source the IDE since it was originally derived from an open source code base. .NET MAUI has a lot of potential, but it doesn’t give you a lot of confidence to invest in it if support can be dropped at any time. Not everyone likes Visual Studio Code so the only realistic option is Rider (its’s not free) or a Virtual Machine with Windows since Apple Silicon doesn’t support bootcamp (yet)
From the blog post (not a VS Mac user myself) .NET 8 is supported in the version that will be “final”. It just won’t be tested against the final version since that hasn’t been released yet.
However if you were to install the .NET 8 SDK on your machine then VS should happily use it with no issues. The only thing(s) that might be missing are any editor-related adjustments for .NET 8 but I cannot think of what that might be at this point given it is so close to release. Language features are basically done and most likely only some API adjustments (which VS won’t care about) are being done. So I would wager you can use VS Mac with no issues against .NET 8 when it is finally released in Nov.
What will happen to Blazor’s cross-platform development feature? If VSMac disappears will we still have an ios-signing-server that allows us to code on windows and sign using a networked macbook?
Hi there! Blazor can still be developed cross-platform. You will still have the pair-to-Mac fucntionality – it doesn’t require an IDE on the Mac and will manage dependencies etc. for you remotely.
well sure, but there are niche situation at the moment like for the Firebase plugin package for Maui where the windows pc cannot create some types and using vs on mac instead works
Telling us to buy another computer isn’t great developer relations. And working with a Mac remotely for debugging purposes is slow, even over a 2.5G ethernet connection. This adds time and frustration to our development cycle.
Very saddening to hear.
I can’t do anything but promote a fork of monodevelop, for anyone who doesn’t want to give up on the open-source IDE we’ve been promised:
https://github.com/dotdevelop
Ignoring Rider in the post knowing that people will ask about why you didn’t mention it is a big spit in a face for the whole community. Shame on you.
Anthony, would it be possible to get extra communication on the following:
1. Can we get some guidance on what Microsoft plans to do with the C# Dev Kit? Right now I believe it requires a Visual Studio license — is this the path forward for the next year or two?
2. Can we address the issues backlog in the C# extension? It’s pretty massive and indicative that not enough resources are dedicated to this extension. Working on a Blazor app in VS Code using the C# plugin is pretty abysmal right now. 🙁
C# Dev Kit and .NET MAUI extension for VS Code have the same terms as the Visual Studio Community edition which means they are free for individuals, academia, and open-source development. For organizations, these extensions are included with a Visual Studio Professional Subscription, Visual Studio Enterprise Subscription and in GitHub Codespaces.
We appreciate all the feedback we’ve received for the VS Code extensions. The team is actively engaging on the issues on the repos and currently fixing bugs releasing weekly as pre-release and monthly stable releases.
Having thought about this overnight, my prediction is that MS re-evaluates this decision. I suspect they are underestimating the impact. They are not just discontinuing an IDE, they have shaken all faith in everything cross-platform from MS.
I see you haven’t been in the MS ecosystem long 🙂
…or maybe you haven’t? They DO re-evaluate their decisions sometimes when there is enough of a backlash.
I’m not a Mac user, but I can understand the frustration from developers that are using VS for Mac…
Just a speculation at this point, but we might see a team-up between JetBrains and Microsoft, with something like free Rider Community Edition. Or something similar that JetBrains had with Google on Android Studio.
Visual Studio IDE probably has too many ties to Windows in order to make it multiplatform. Although, if I remember correctly, there were some efforts into creating a shared functionality between VS and VS for Mac.
Rider won’t cut it, I’m afraid. I (and many others) had such bad experiences with some of the early versions of Resharper that JetBrains will NEVER have a product installed on a machine I work with.
Personal predjudices aside, Rider appears to have only the most basic support for Xamarin, so that’s a whole ecosystem that would STILL be without a suitable solution.
I find your invoking “usage patterns” incredibly dishonest. VS for Mac 2019 had no user interface to speak of poor navigation, the 2022 update was marginally more functional and only superficially closer to the Windows experience. “Usage patterns” showing decent adoption requires actually trying to entice users…
Claiming you are ending support VS for Mac because it isn’t used by developers when developers don’t use it because you never actually supported it much is just gaslighting.
What happens to a Xamarin.iOS application? Not a Xam.Forms, not a Maui project, but a Xamarin.iOS project. What is there for VSCode to load and run them?
VS Code with the MAUI extension will work with .NET for iOS. You do have to upgrade your Xamarin.iOS app to .NET iOS before the Xamarin EOL in May 2024, but for most Xamarin.iOS apps that is a really straightforward process – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/migration/apple-projects
I’m dubious about the “most” in your statement. I tried to migrate one of my Xamarin Forms apps using the migration tool and it was a sh*t show. And in order to use the migration tool you need to buy a Windows PC so you can run proper VS. I understand that you’re in a tough situation, and I appreciate your positive company perspective. But Microsoft should acknowledge the challenges here and re-think this strategy.
Really disappointed. Not a fan of Windows, dated, clunky and inconsistent , but great news for JetBrains, guess I will go back to Rider , VSCode is not a replacement IDE
We have been developing our Xamarin.iOS app for over 10 years, releasing many versions during that time. We’ve had to adapt to changes like moving from Xamarin Studio to Visual Studio, and now in 2022, you’ve suddenly announced that support will end in a year. This leaves us with little time to transition our codebase and no clear guidance on how to migrate an Xamarin.iOS app specifically.
While you’ve suggested some potential solutions, it’s unclear if they will work for our app and meet all our needs. We rely on many packages and plugins that may not be compatible. This change puts the burden fully on us developers to figure out a migration path with high risk, rather than Microsoft providing a smooth transition for long-time Xamarin customers.
We understand priorities shift, but dropping support so abruptly for a decade-old platform many rely on feels short-sighted. More transparency and transition assistance would have been appreciated rather than leaving valuable customers scrambling to adapt on their own. This experience calls Microsoft’s reliability into question for future technologies they may prematurely discontinue as well.
I agree with Philics Li. We have also been developing a Xamarin.iOS app for over 10 years. These abrupt decisions make companies like ours re-question using the .NET platform for iOS development.
Hi Philics! We announced the end of Xamarin.iOS support about a year ago – it is targeted for May 2024. Your upgrade path to remain on a supported platform is fairly straightforward as .NET for iOS (the modern version of Xamarin.iOS) is virtually the same as Xamarin.iOS, you just have to recompile it and your dependencies. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/xamarin
You can follow the docs here to learn more – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/migration/native-projects – and you can email maui-upgrades@microsoft.com with any migration specific questions.
Once you have updated your app, you can use VS Code with the .NET MAUI extension to develop your .NET for iOS app (even though it isn’t MAUI – we just put it all in the same extension!). You will also be able to use Xcode the same as you do currently and we’re working to bring the Xcode sync story into VS Code as well so it’s a seamless experience.
Sorry for the confusion and changes here – we’ve had quite a few Xamarin.iOS specific customers successfully get onto .NET 7 and ship their apps without much difficulty!
We appreciate you providing this helpful information. Migrating our app to Xcode is looking like a viable long-term solution for us to consider. While not a commercial offering, it would bring great peace of mind to our technical team if Microsoft could provide some guidance on transitioning given our decade of investment in Xamarin.
Even non-official resources like documentation on converting key C# code snippets to Swift, strategies for migrating C# components into Swift packages, and other technical migration tips would be invaluable as we look to move away from Xamarin. We want to be strategic, not rushed, in transitioning our codebase and minimizing disruption to our workflows and product. Any technical assistance Microsoft can unofficially provide would go a long way in making this transition manageable versus leaving valuable customers to figure it out alone.
Does this also cover Xamarin.VisualStudio.RazorTemplatePreprocessor, or was that already deprecated as part of Xamarin? Unsure of its packaging as it used to be part of MonoDevelop.
This is incredibly disappointing. I may use Jetbrains Rider most of the time, but there are tasks that require VS for Mac, like submitting apps to the stores. I don’t understand why Microsoft would abandon VS for Mac now when there isn’t a replacement with feature parity. VS Code is not an IDE. It doesn’t even support Solution files, debugging is rudimentary (e.g. no instrumentation), etc. This seems like really bad timing, at best, and a really bad idea at worst.
That’s a shame. I just switched to Mac as my main machine and use VS4M on a daily basis. I’ve never understood the “dotnet is xplat, we build tools for all platforms” and the fact that we can’t have the same IDE from MS running everywhere such as JB Rider does. When will MS just provide the same VS on all platforms?
I wanted to buy and test Dev Kit 2023 but I got info that they don’t ship to the EU, a few weeks later OUT OF STOCK.
So I’m wondering how you can withdraw a product without giving an alternative. Personally, I use JetBrains for mac, but I’m curious about the logic of this decision 🙂
So, since VS for Mac is no longer supported we can assume that in the near future you will abandon dotNet MAUI support on Mac as well, and that means screw you to all of us developers, I knew I shouldn’t have trusted in Microsoft cross platform bullshit.
.NET MAUI isn’t going anywhere. The investment has stayed the same if not increased in recent months. We’re excited about the future of MAUI on macOS with VS Code. I know it’s not a full replacement for an IDE but we think the experience alongside Xcode will be better than what you have today with VS Mac.
MS should at least disclose what process this decision was made by.
This doesn’t appear to be a decision with the goal of making the experience better for developers using VS for Mac. It seems more like Microsoft not wanting to invest the resources into giving VS for Mac feature parity with the Windows version. We’ve gone from using a single development IDE to build and deploy apps on all platforms using a single computer, to needing two computers and testing some of the platforms using a slow remote screen sharing process. I exclude VS Code at this point because it can’t be used in most scenarios, with or without plugins.
This is truly tragic and on a deeper level disturbing. Yes VS Code have made huge leaps in functionality and can be very competent in some areas but it can never be compared to the first class citizen that the full Visual Studio is. For so many, like me, Visual Studio is home. Sure you can do side trips with other environments but if you don’t have an anchor to come home to it won’t be possible to steer towards bigger goals.
If even Microsoft can’t make cross platform development work for Visual Studio IDE how does Microsoft expect us to believe in its commitment to MAUI?
Sad, very sad…..
This is a big surprise for me. I have to say that Visual Studio for Mac works much much much better for iOS and Android than Visual Studio for Windows and it is faster. To run a MAUI project from my Visual Studio for Windows (on the Surface Laptop) to an Android emulator takes me from 4 to 7 minutes; on my iMac 5/8 seconds. To run the same project on an iOS Simulator, in Visual Studio for Windows 6/10 minutes (although the iOS emulator is open) and 3/5 seconds on my iMac.
I think this is a wrong decision from Microsoft. Also, why do you try to push cross-platform applications if we can’t create one or we face a lot of technical issues?
What is now the intended development workflow to develop MAUI apps for MacOS and iOS? Really only a VS code plugin, for which you still need a VS Pro licence?
Visual Studio 2022 running on Windows and Visual Studio Code available on Windows, Mac or Linux are both options for building .NET MAUI apps. These capabilities in Visual Studio and .NET MAUI extension for VS Code are free for individuals, academia, and open-source development with the same terms as the Visual Studio Community edition. For organizations, the .NET MAUI extension is included with a Visual Studio Professional, Enterprise Subscription and in GitHub Codespaces.
Microsoft, shame on you
As someone who has recently ported their Xamarin.iOS app to .net7-ios, I am not particularly wedded to vs.mac but I still need to develop, build, test and deploy iOS apps. Can I actually do that from Visual Studio on a PC? What’s the workflow? Is Microsoft still going to support some kind of build agent that will run on the Mac to facilitate the mac-specific stuff?
Yes. You can develop apps for iOS on Visual Studio 2022 on Windows. You’ll need to have a Mac device available to Pair your Windows IDE to your Mac (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/ios/pair-to-mac). This also works from the command line. For some changes Hot Restart (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/ios/hot-restart) can save some time with deployment by deploying the updated app to the existing app bundle on your test device.
Thanks Anthony, but I have no use for MAUI. I presume the information in the links you pasted also works for native net7-ios apps?
Cowards
Microsoft was making noticeable progress in moving visual studio across architectures with 64bit and ARM support. Moving visual studio to latest dotnet isn’t yet officially planned (https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Move-Visual-Studio-2022-to-NET-6) but is progressing gradually anyway and is inevitable. Simultaneously VS4Mac was adopting parts of the VS codebase.
It’s strange that this strategy didn’t work as if it had completed it would have resulted in a much better VS4Mac with much lower long-run maintenance costs. Once the core was merged, they could have used Avalonia to deploy the WPF UI.
As a company which deploys cross-platform software with dotnet, we are not that worried as long as there is some way to debug apps on iOS/MacOS from a Windows or Mac machine. As Jorge Morales Vidal notes in a comment here, VS4Mac is not required for builds and for example is not part of the current standard ios/mac build on Azure Devops.
But it does seem like a strategic failure for Microsoft to have it’s premier IDE only usable on Windows.
Thanks.
Our Visual Studio Enterprise subscriptions will not be renewed.
Just now: Thank you for downloading Rider!
Thank you Microsoft to push me to try Rider. Last version of Rider with brand new minimalistic UI is great. It’s looks and feels better than VS for Mac. Also It’s more stable and faster. I spent one hour to setup appearance and key bindings just like I used in VS for Mac. JetBrains did way much better job than one of the biggest and richest company in the world. Going to buy Rider and I advise everyone to do the same.
As Michael Scott once said, “I hate so much about the things that you choose to be.”
I for one am ecstatic that Microsoft has made this move. It clarifies a long standing perception I’ve had, that Microsoft is out of the game on Mac and ultimately all things mobile. MAUI, Xamarin, UWP, WPF, Silverlight are all in the dust bin of history. It was good while it lasted. Life will get simpler, and the world will get much smaller for the Microsoft technology stack and the developers that sit on top of it, which will dramatically reduce competition from Microsoft. Microsoft is becoming an enterprise only company. The consumer space is out of scope for the company moving forward.
Apple focused on the consumer and we see how well that worked for them: largest market cap. So I’m not sure why Microsoft wouldn’t also focus on that market.
It all started with the failure of Windows Phone. Most of Apples consumer space revolves around mobile. Any company without at least half its enterprise in mobile has no long term future. Microsoft’s cloud initiatives will eventually be significantly diminished by what Apple will be able to do on the consumer side. Microsoft isn’t going away on the enterprise side for a long time. But they will get completely pushed out of the consumer space. Say good bye to most of their hardware business, and a significant chunk of the software side. Microsoft is now officially the new IBM. On the same path, with the same trajectory. I was a long in the tooth, die hard, super duper Microsoft fanboy. Killing UWP and the backwards slide of Windows 11 did it for me. When you lose folks like myself, you’re done.
If you know the uwp tech stack and toolchain you should know it’s bound to die out. On the contrary WASDK/WinUI3 really gave me hope for the modernization of Windows (UWP related technologies were mutilated into that project but ditched that stagnant pile of exclusive poison), although it’s still struggling.
This is a bit disappointing; but given the internal struggle in Microsoft about Windows First/Microsoft First vs. Build and Deploy anywhere, it’s not surprising.
The best thing about .NET was the idea of embracing different platforms; that viewpoint has lost out to the reality that if folks dump windows because they don’t have to use it anymore to develop, then Microsoft loses out on licensing fees, upselling and cross selling Office, and ads that they insist on putting in Windows 10 and Windows 11.
It’s hard not to be jaded, but this current version of Microsoft is embarrassing as a developer organization.
Developers using Linux or Mac, the dotnet ecosystem isn’t exactly the best choice. Microsoft will always prioritize Windows users.
Rider is an excellent IDE, JetBrains has amazing products IMHO, but despite that, there are things it doesn’t have available, for example Odata client generator.
In the Java/Spring ecosystem for example, yes the user experience is the same, no matter which OS you use.
Personally I’m considering changing jobs so I don’t have to work with .NET anymore 🙏🏻
I really love this bold move my Microsoft as Visual Studio Mac was never a usable product, rather C# Dev Kit for VS Code is much better. Now invest those resources and time into improving the C# Dev Kit and C# development experience in VS Code.
“Informed by ongoing user feedback and usage patterns”
Can Microsoft be a bit more open about what this means? Does this relate to low usage of Xamarin.Mac and .NET macos targeting? Does it also relate to iOS development? Although MacOS targeting usage may be low, I assume iOS targeting is quite important to Microsoft. Doesn’t iOS targeting alone warrant keeping a minimally functioning VS for Mac?
There are countless times where VS for Windows iOS development tools are broken but the VS for Mac platform is working fine. The interaction with iOS Simulators alone warrants running natively on MacOS for iOS development vs running on Windows. Anyone who actually uses these tools on a daily basis would know this. Is there a lack of dog-fooding iOS .net development tools to internal Microsoft teams? Do they not use the tools they build for their customers?
This is such a bizarre decision. Why not stop new feature development but keep maintaining the code base for your customers? I think the investment cost vs damage to your customers has been miscalculated by Microsoft on this issue.
Confused long time user of Mono, Xamarin, and Microsoft frameworks.
I have been impressed with MS direction with .Net Core. I have been trying to sell it to our clients with investments in MS technologies. I would usually test .Net dev environments using VisualStudio, VisualStudio Code, and Rider on Windows, Mac, and Linux (not visual studio). I guess I will take visual studio off the list for mac now. I am not sure this is a good decision. The latest visual studio mac wasn’t too bad and seemed like a commitment to mutli-platform. I’m not a super big fan of VisualStudio Code for development. I do use it for other things. I find it more of a bloated text editor than an IDE. VisualStudio Mac was pretty tight. Although, I prefer Rider.
Over all, our policy is that we try to support any tool a developer wants to use. This gives them one less option.
JetBrains kicked Microsoft’s ass a long time ago, using JAVA! Can you believe it? Rider it’s awesome. Instead of going after the ones that can make VS MacOS good, they just give up. Just like always. What a shame. Now everyone rethinking investing o Microsoft’s environment… Congratulations.
Pronably the worst decision microsoft could make.
Start porting VS 2022 to .NET MAUI and stop wasting time on other non-IDEs 🙂
This also came to my mind when I read this. But I fear that MS has the same trust in MAUI as others have – and as the past showed you could either be silverlighted, WinUI’d or UWP’d, Xamarin’d, the next is maybe MAUI’d. There is no clear vision on this.
To be fair though VS already went through this process a decade ago. When WPF was being pushed as the next great Windows UX MS was struggling with complaints about it not being production ready. So they started moving portions of VS to WPF and started seeing the problems others had. The biggest benefit of this was that they worked with the WPF team to fix issues and improve performance such that WPF became a more solid framework. Ultimately they didn’t migrate all of VS because of compatibility issues and just low ROI. I could see MS doing a similar thing here where they start replatforming portions of the UI to MAUI (or whatever tech they want to rely on) and that will cause investment in the framework to make it work properly. Given the recent switch to x64 that broke everybody anyway then this is probably a good time to start making more changes that would break older extensions. However they would need to solve the same problem that others would in that MAUI runs on .NET 6+ only whereas VS is still NF 4.8 so they would have to get newer UI logic working on the older framework or upgrade everything (which would break extensions).
Understandable decision, now resources can focus on one cross-platform product and hopefully also .NET MAUI which still has major shortcomings. However the Dev Kit extension should provide templates for creating native iOS / macOS apps and Blazor hosted apps.
MAUI and Visual Studio team, this leaves me with a bunch of questions for MAUI and its direction:
– How do I develop macCatalyst applications using MAUI? I have a product built on MAUI specifically for macOS. What is the vision for developers like me to continue our macOS MAUI journey?
– How do I create and consume Android and iOS native binding projects? Again, I have a product where this is mission critical and I need to routinely regenerate the binding. The documentation for doing this refers specifically to VS Mac to create the binding; how will I create these binding projects in future?
I susgest you all try avalonia. Its been great so far.
My real concern is MAUI. I Hope they don’t kill it as well and reallocate all the resources on VS for Mac to MAUI.
Don’t tell me that Microsoft is pursuing cross-platform.
Let’s be honest, Microsoft: you hate us Mac users. You just want us all to move over to Windows. You committed to Visual Studio for macOS and I was happy to see that you were focused on making it native and improving accessibility. ‘m making a game in Unity, and as a result, I depend on Visual Studio for Mac. VS Code, while good enough for me with respect to things like JavaScript and Python, it’s just not good enough for languages like Swift, C++, and C#. I’ve tried, I’ve really tried, but it’s not good enough. Not to mention the amount of unnecessary amount of RAM, and the fact that the accessibility support is still terrible (mainly due to it being an Electron app). Now I’m worried about whether I need to pay for this stuff. I’m not rich: I have enough on my plate and I don’t need a code editor to be yet another expense. I bring up “expense” because of your announcement of the C# Dev Kit, but it’s only free for open source, personal, and educational use. I have an indie studio; I suppose I don’t fall under any of these. If I’m going to pay for a code editor, then I may as well purchase and use JetBrains Rider, since I’ve heard so many good things about it.
The reason why I purchased a Mac was to run macOS, Linux, and Windows as I please. As long as the Mac continues to do that for me, I will continue to use a Mac. It doesn’t matter what you do: I will continue to use it. If the Mac no longer supports my needs, I will use some Linux distro. While I do use and pay for Windows, and I’m happy to pay for it, I will not be using it as my main operating system of choice. You’re not going to convince me to switch to Windows full-time. You could have had a dedicated team working on this, or you could have merged it with the main Visual Studio team for them to help the macOS team. But no: you just wanted to keep the Windows users happy, while us Mac users use second-class non-native applications (I have no doubt that Linux developers feel a similar way). Yes, I know that there’s a plugin for Unity, but the other features that make Visual Studio for Mac useful will (probably) be locked behind a paywall, all while I have to give even more resources to VS Code.
I wish you were better than this, Microsoft. I know that all that matters is the bottom dollar, but, like the other comments have said, this is a slap in the face for us Mac developers. I suppose I should expect only lies and deceit from you from now on. No disrespect to the people working there: I’m talking to the higher-ups that decided to do this.
Sad and disappointing. It was the best way to develop for Microsoft .NET Core environments working pretty good on the best computer machines. Why this step back? VS Code is not nowadays a good replacement for that.
Does your VS Code C# Dev Kit extension give us a debugger with breakpoints and stepthrough etc? ’cause I really don’t need clever intellisense “AI” bullshit that steals code from other devs by laundering it through a machine learning algorithm. I just need to see what my variables are up to during runtime.
will pairing Visual Studio to Mac machine from Windows still work post August 31,2024? Or it will also have some if and buts?
Disappointing but not surprising. Microsoft’s own apps now uses React-Native for Windows and Mac. Their mobile offering uses React Native. Xamarin forms took more than 10 years to stabilize before being discontinued and Maui currently has 2500+ bugs on GitHub. Microsoft is more of a cloud service provider now. My friends warned me about going the Microsoft way long back because they are so big that they have no regard for the general population. The only care about selling subscriptions, be it office or azure. Cross-platform looks like a far-fetched dream without a cross-platform IDE. Sadly looking to switch over to either Flutter or React Native. If things remain the same, people will rather get back to developing native apps in kotlin and swift which might be time consuming but will free then from unforeseen and unpredictable situations like this.
PS: I am a Xamarin/Maui develeper using a Mac machine.
Microsoft is not and cannot be a true proponent of cross platform development – it’s too expensive to support. It follows that C# will never be a language fully suited for true cross platform development. Hence, developing on MacOS will never be supported adequately by Microsoft. This wouldn’t be such a big issue for many except for the fact Apple has the best hardware for laptops.
What Microsoft really needs a new O/S kernel based on Unix/Linux, new hardware based on latest chip technologies, and a port of all their apps and tools. Windows, WSL, Azure, C#, .NET, WPF, UWP, MAUI, Blazor, all need to be rethought and implemented on the new platform. If Microsoft keeps fumbling around in the past someone in China or India in the next decade is going to surpass Windows and MacOS and take over computing based on a far more cohesive and consistent platform.
I currently have a deployed solution actively generating revenue comprised of 150K+ lines of C# at present and only ~150 lines of JavaScript, featuring 45K lines of Razor running as a Blazor server-side application and working perfectly on every modern device. Users do not have to install anything and simply load a wicked-fast web page hosted on Azure. It runs the same on iOS, Mac, Droid, and Windows without exception. Seems pretty cross-platform to me.
I guess that Visual Studio for ARM64 is the path forward in the long run?
That’s a such a shame.
I have always been a fan of VS over Rider. After this news I’ll never use VS again.
Chao,
Ilia
MAUI is next in line to sunset.
LULZ
Visual Studio for Windows is outdated and should be phased out. VS Code is a superior and modern alternative that can fully replace Visual Studio with some enhancements. There is no need to maintain two different products.
we are doing dotnetcore development for some years now, we were already switched to rider on windows platform, because of the poor performance of resharper in Visual Studio. Then when we migrated to MacOS for devs we just continued to use Rider by Jetbrains, and it is the best development experience. Far more better then VS Code with the C# plugin. If you want more info, feel free to contact me on my socials somewhere.
Good riddance!
I will continue using VS for Mac only for resolving consolidates of Nuget packages
My initial though it is that we’re loosing one of the best free IDE you could get, but thinking twice about it. I also complain about why it’s not avaiable in Linux :shurg:. I do not know the reasons behind this change, although VS Code + C# Dev Kit are avaiable in most of the popular OS, reaching a broader audience.
It true that VS4MAC was always behind of VS in Windows, which in some cases felt kind of lame, it would take some time for VSCode+C#DevKit to reach the level (if it ever happens) of VS4MAC moreover the change in the mind set to use a new editor.
If C# Dev Kit allows a good workflow as it currenly may be possible with VS4MAC, (hopefully) it would imply that also same work could happen on Linux, which sounds kind of nice.
The I guess my complain is missing the well know IDE in favor of their alternative. BTW, why not making it Open Source once more? I guess, there should good reasons but just curious.
Will we get a CLI option to securely store credentials for private Nuget sources? Currently, this feature is only available via Visual Studio for Mac.
There is also the option to store the password in clear text. I shouldn’t have to mention that that option is a bad idea.
Since it was originally open source, any chance you’d open source it when support ends? So the community can keep it going?
This is sad news indeed and sends the completely wrong message to mobile developers using MacOS. I’ve been using Xamarin for years as I have a C# background and VS Mac was improving, albeit slowly, These types of flippant sweeping changes makes me seriously question whether using Microsoft for mobile app development is just too risky in the long term. VSCode is a token gesture and not a ready substitute, so looks like I’ll have to use VS on Windows in a virtual machine which is far from ideal. I worry whether Microsoft is truly committed to cross platform mobile development in the long term, I really can’t afford anymore disruption. Abandoning cross platform and migrating to Swift with Xcode seems a much more reliable option right now.
This sucks, Visual Studio Code sucks for actual development compared to Visual Studio (for Windows/Mac), We have a lot of our team being forced to use it because their computers are too slow to run Visual Studio.
Switching to a M1 Mac, made Visual Studio rock (5 minute compile times on my Fast Windows machine (8700K, overlocked, SSDs running at 5 GB/sec) – big project.. Takes… 9.5 seconds on my Mac Studio running Visual Studio Code. Full build is 15 Minutes on the Windows, and 1:47 on the mac – Oh, that is with the Mac running 10 VMs that are running Windows and running an app that keeps the CPU maxed.). To be fair, I’m using a Mac Studio Ultra as the Mac, but the point is that it is Fast, and works well…
I’m missing some things like being able to type in ‘prop’ to create a property and the AI stuff to auto-complete is nice (but I’d turn that off to save CPU cycles on the Windows machine if it mattered – I did have to drop the Resharper on the WIndows machine – too slow.. but I’d use it in a heartbeat if I could on the Mac.)
Used this software since it was Xamarin, and I was paying $250/year for it (before Microsoft raised the price to $1K/year, OH, yeah, it was “free” now, but you had to pay $1K for a VS license, which I had one through work, but when I use my work license on another machine it wants to reconfigure that machine to be part of the company.. I had my Windows machine do that, thankfully, Mac’s can’t do that that I’m aware of.)
Anyway, will be sad to see that they acquired a company just to kill them. Typical Micro-dick move…
I just got upgraded off the Preview version on the Mac… I’ve been on the Windows machine for over a year and just started using it again on the Mac.
Guys you are replacing something stable (VS for Mac and Xamarin) with something as unstable as is written in .NET MAUI extension for VS Code:
This extension is still in early preview, so there are a number of known limitations.
That’s from the Marketplace MAUI extension page: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotnettools.dotnet-maui
So really? You want us to switch from an IDE to a code editor with an extension in EARLY PREVIEW?