Microsoft Discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac
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.
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With today’s announcement, we’re redirecting our resources and focus to enhance Visual Studio and VS Code, optimizing them for cross-platform development.
It was probably not a good sign that the two very different products had such similar names. Mac users often didn’t realize they were two separate products. Visual Studio for Mac was also quite different from Visual Studio for Windows, despite having the same name.
Via Zac Hall:
Visual Studio 2022 introduced a major overhaul for the Mac version including a native user interface and Apple Silicon optimization while going full 64-bit for the first time. Microsoft first brought VS to the Mac in 2016.
To be a fly on the wall of the room where the “sure, we just put a ton of person-hours into migrating UI code from Xwt to AppKit, but MAUI doesn’t support AppKit, so we don’t have a cohesive strategy there; let’s just can the thing” call was made.
Were there huge underestimated technical hurdles? Did MS downsize their non-Azure .NET efforts?
I spent some time using Visual Studio for Mac and thought it was the victim of poor branding. It was originally the Xamarin IDE - and did a pretty good job at C# or Xamarin related tasks. But it didn’t include Visual C++ which mislead a lot of teams that thought it was feature for feature comparable to the Windows version. Even talked to teams that thought it could build native Windows apps on Mac.
It is a little weird because Microsoft was really pushing their cross platform MAUI framework - which was the successor to Xamarin. Pushing cross platform development without a cross platform IDE is a little weird. Yes - they’re shipping MAUI plugins for Visual Studio Code. But I’m not sure that’s really comparable to having an IDE like Visual Studio Not-Code.
Previously:
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That sucks. I used Visual Studio for Mac for a fairly big project in work recently, working with a developer using the Windows version, and it was a great experience. I did alternate between Visual Studio for Mac and VS Code, as I’m most familiar with the latter, but for debugging and running the build process, the full Visual Studio was really good. I hope the C# Dev Kit extension for VS Code is a sufficient replacement.
I’m quite surprised at this discontinuation, as Microsoft seemed to be investing in the product, only recently adding a native UI, for example.
Microsoft with unimaginative product naming? You don't say!