Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac and committing to security updates and platform update compatibility for the next 12 months. 9to5Mac reports: “With today’s announcement, we are refocusing our resources and focus on improving Visual Studio and VS Code and optimizing them for cross-platform development,” the company said in the announcement. “No new framework, runtime, or language support will be added to Visual Studio for Mac.” The company added, “We will also continue to provide runtime and workload updates so you can continue to build and ship 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.”
Once the wheels of Visual Studio for Mac fall, Microsoft recommends accessing the IDE through Windows on a virtual machine on the Mac or in the cloud. Otherwise, Microsoft points to cross-platform developer technology that will run on macOS: “The recently announced C# Dev Kit, .NET MAUI, and Unity Extensions for VS Code are in preview and are intended to extend the capabilities of VS Code for .NET. and C# developers. These extensions work natively on all supported platforms, including macOS, and the experience of using them will continue to improve as they move from preview to GA and beyond.”