Microsoft Is Discontinuing Visual Studio For Mac After Major Overhaul

Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac, committing to security updates and platform update compatibility for the next 12 months. 9to5Mac reports: "With today's announcement, we're redirecting our resources and focus to enhance Visual Studio and VS Code, 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 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."

Once the wheels fall off Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft recommends accessing its IDE through Windows in a machine virtual on the Mac or in the cloud. Otherwise, Microsoft points to cross-platform compatible developer technology that will run on macOS: "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."

Re:

[nextTimeIsTheLast]

BS Code ... Small , lightweight?? wut

Just Don't Touch VS Code!

[machineghost]

As long as they don't touch Visual Studio *Code* for Mac/Linux, personally I'm not very concerned.

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[KiloByte]

Aye, while software can't be removed after being released, this particular piece should be at least left to rot untouched.

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[Himmy32]

VS Code is a glorified web app, so compatibility is not at risk. Can even run it in the browser at https://vscode.dev/ [vscode.dev]

What's the right MacOS path for Unity?

[Speare]

Unity deprecated their VS Code support a year ago. Vanishingly few hobby developers use the debugger and single-step through Unity C# code, but lots of professional developers do.

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[sg_oneill]

Thats whats worrying me too as a Mac based developer (Theres a lot of us, love or hate the platform, it works well for server devs as a unix based system, so most server software just works and can be deved on a mac and then compiled without modification on linux) although Arm definately added a hickup to the equasion [for docker and the like. Mitigatable but occasionally irritating])

However, IntelliJs Rider is a fine enough IDE for the task and its debugging tools (breakpoints, stack traversals, etc etc) a

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[Fingerbob]

Unity deprecated their VS Code support a year ago. Vanishingly few hobby developers use the debugger and single-step through Unity C# code, but lots of professional developers do.

Microsoft has just recently released an officially supported Unity extension which supports debugging.
https://code.visualstudio.com/... [visualstudio.com]
You need to update to latest everything to get the relevant underlying systems that support it, which brings other challenges, but it does work.

M-x deprecate-product

[RightwingNutjob]

Now get off my lawn!

Jetbrains Rider

[Richard_at_work]

Pretty sure at this point, most .Net devs on Mac are using Jetbrains Rider as their IDE.

Been doing .Net on Mac now since 2018, exclusively through Rider - tried VS Code early on, but it was a painful experience, but Rider offers me all I need in an IDE. Develop on Mac, build on TeamCity in Linux, deploy to AWS. Not a penny goes to MS. And these arent small applications either.

Sure, Jetbrains is pay-for, but cant expect a third party to release a fully developed IDE for free.

I know I'm a dinosaur

[93 Escort Wagon]

On various occasions I've tried out different development environments on Mac, but I keep falling back to just using BBedit.

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[chrism238]

I hear you! For me, vi and the command-line still meet my needs.

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[Jeremi]

Here's a second for vi/vim. Its user interface may be terrible, but it's been terrible in pretty much exactly the same ways on every platform since the 1980s, and there's no risk of it getting discontinued. It's a pain in the ass to learn, but once you've learned it, that muscle-memory remains useful indefinitely.

Jetbrains for the (commercial) win

[echo123]

You might want to take a Jetbrains IDE for a test-drive. Since all the cool kids in my realm were using PHPstorm, I adopted it also and I'm not looking back. Technology in 2023 is a lot better now than when BBEDIT started out.

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[jandoe]

Actually I just switched back to vim after using Jetbrains for years. With the new LSP plugins it offers all the features I had in Idea but is a lot faster and more ergonomic.

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[ratbag]

Not saying it's not true, but I can't find a source for the "Apple pays Adobe" comment, can you help me out?

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[the_B0fh]

That's still not "Apple pays Adobe" is it?

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[MachineShedFred]

Apple understands that if you're going to fundamentally switch hardware platforms and have anyone buy the new hardware, you need to have native apps for it. This is a lesson learned over some hard transitions they've done in the past, such as MC68k > PPC, PPC32 > PPC64, PPC64 > x86-64, and finally x86-64 > aarch64. They don't want to get burned again like in the past with QuarkXPress's bullshit in the switch to PowerPC where their customers had to limp along for a year in emulation because Qua

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[jwhyche]

Well, I went back and found some of the evidence but since people think I'm lying and a toll you can find it yourself. It wouldn't matter if I posted it now or not. Truth is, this not that uncommon a business practice. Many companies have paid for development costs on products, and even paid a portion of profits to keep those products on their platform.

But you people want to have attitude about it, you can all go fuck yourselves.

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[NoMoreACs]

I guess after the overhaul they realized it's not worth supporting a platform with a uncertain future and such a small install base. Apple pays Adobe to continue to support the platform. I wonder if they could broker such a deal with microsoft.

Liar.

And Fucking Liar.

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[NoMoreACs]

Mac Fanboys are so hopeless.

And Cowards are. . .?

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[KlomDark]

Mesmerize, hypnotise, monetise, rotten fruit shit company

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[bruce_the_moose]

The 1990s called and they want your bullshit comment back

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[MachineShedFred]

Why would Apple pay Microsoft for an IDE that is really only largely used for .NET development when there is a free version used for many other things (VS Code) as well as their own Xcode IDE which they could extend for .NET development if they thought there was a gap in tooling?

Iâ(TM)ll miss it

[Burnon]

I have a lot of nostalgia for the product and will miss it. Working with Xamarin before there was a Xamarin.Forms, it and its predecessor Xamarin Studio made it possible to support a few different operating systems in the embedded system and mobile space with one code base.

Were it not for it, a *nix geek like me never would have become as comfortable with the Microsoft ecosystem as Iâ(TM)ve become (even with a decade spent working on Windows CE). Only Microsoft knows how many developers this is going t

Behind the curve

[spaceyhackerlady]

Visual Studio for Mac always seemed to be behind the curve of Visual Studio on Windows. I argued with it for much of the last year doing MAUI development targeting iOS (and Android) until the Powers That Be decided the app they told me to create wasn't actually the one they wanted after all...

VS Code for Mac is slick. Hell, VS Code for anything is slick. I moved my MAUI iOS development to it as soon as I could so I could implement fixes for a couple of show-stopper bugs that were fixed in .net 8.

...laura

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[Malc]

I tried VS Studio for Mac when it first came out, and it was a load of garbage. Did they improve it?

Honestly, it was brand abuse. It wasn't a port of VS Studio, but a completely unrelated product (rebranded version of MonoDevelop) that they decided to give the same name to. It was utterly shit and bloated beyond belief, and made the VS Studio (on Windows) look like the best development tools on the planet.

I use VS Code mostly, also completely unrelated to VS Studio. It's annoys me that it doesn't suppor

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[Archibald Buttle]

Ctrl-+A and Ctrl+E work fine for me on the Mac version of VSCode...

I wonder if you've installed some kind of extension that's re-defining those key combos.

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[KlomDark]

OK buddy, sure. You keep telling yourself that...

Virtual Machines?

[Malc]

Microsoft recommends accessing its IDE through Windows in a machine virtual on the Mac

Sounds like bullshit. This is fine if you're on an Intel Mac, but the clock is ticking. I still can't download an ARM version of Windows to install from my Visual Studio Subscription (formerly known as MSDN). There was a way to get a virtual disk from Microsoft with Windows ARM pre-installed, but the licensing (yeah, some companies look at this) didn't support our usage.

Not and IDE kinda guy, but I liked Codewarrior

[MIPSPro]

Anyone remember Metroworks Codewarrior? That was always my favorite IDE for the Mac, but I haven't really put much effort into MacOS in the OSX era. I still like the window manager and desktop behavior of System 7. Anyhow, I have to go feed my brontosaurus, gotta go.

Bad move perhaps?

[mendax]

Why on earth would anyone want to develop software on a piece-of-shit OS like Windows? It is so fucking annoying! There is a very good reason why I use macOS and Macs. It respects my choices and doesn't bother me when I don't do things Apple's way!

Big deal

[Murdoch5]

Visual Studio is a "meh" quality IDE that isn't great for anything, but okay(ish) at a bunch of things. When was the last time you needed an IDE and thought "Visual Studio", I doubt very much, if ever, in the last 5+ years. With companies like JetBrains, who produce high quality IDE's that are great in certain areas, and are cross-platform, and the wide array of open source projects, editors, etc... there is no need to use Visual Studio.

It is absolutely unacceptable and ridiculous that a program in 2023

Glad my intution was right not to trust MS

[shubus]

Yes, I grew suspicious some time ago when MS started supporting MacOS and long suspected that they'd pull the plug at some point so happy to abandoned Mac Visual Studio early on.