Visual Studio for Mac is being phased out. Microsoft announced that it would support the IDE for another year, but the curtain will finally fall.

In August 2024, Microsoft is completely abandoning Visual Studio for Mac, despite the long-awaited visual design update in May. The company announced this week that it was ceasing production integrated development environmentbut that support is still granted for one year.

Long goodbye

Version 17.6 will receive another year of security and platform updates from Apple, but support will end on August 31 next year. After this date, Visual Studio will continue to be available as a legacy version for users with Visual Studio subscriptions.

The company will now optimize Visual Studio primarily for cross-platform development. There will be no new framework, new language support, or extended runtime, but there will continue to be support for security and bug fixes, as well as for updated platforms from Apple. There will be updates for duration as well as for workload. Also, rudimentary support for .NET 8 has been enabled, although this is not official support.

Alternate options

Microsoft reiterates its commitment to Mac developers to continue providing alternatives such as the recently announced C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code. There are also other extensions, Microsoft promises; Users can continue to take advantage of .NET development for Mac. For example, there is also .NET MAUI and Unity. The three extensions are now in preview and are intended to expand the capabilities of VS Code for .NET and C# developers. They can also be used on all supported platforms.

Another alternative to accommodate this setting is to run the Windows Visual Studio IDE in a VM on the Mac. This option would cover most IDE needs, such as supporting legacy projects for Xamarin and F#, and remote development on iOS via a VM.

In addition to the extensions and the Mac VM solution, there is also a third option: Windows Visual Studio IDE in a VM via the cloud. A VM in the cloud from the Microsoft Dev Box, launched in July, can access all the features of VS over the web or your Mac’s native RDP client, without the overhead of a virtual machine on your actual device.