Microsoft is retiring Visual Studio for Mac in 2024

Previously (with comment volume): &quot;Visual Studio for Mac Retirement Announcement&quot; (39 points, 2 months ago, 7 comments)[0], &quot;Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac after major overhaul&quot; (116 points, 111 comments)[1], JetBrains also did 65% discount when it was first announced [over now] (56 points, 64 comments)[2]<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37325427">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37325427</a> [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37326419">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37326419</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37369946">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37369946</a>

Not to be confused with Visual Studio Code, the text editor, which will remain supported.

Visual Studio for Mac had its roots in Xamarian Studio, which had its roots in MonoDevelop. Each one has always been a rebrand of the previous product.<p>(Edit: I forgot to point out that Visual Studio for Mac never appeared to be a port. It always appeared to be a &quot;clone&quot; of Visual Studio with a very similar UI.)<p>They&#x27;ve always been rather buggy and unstable compared to Visual Studio on Windows. They were a nice way to do C# on Mac without needing to load a VM; and for the last few years I really appreciated that C# was getting &quot;first class&quot; support on Mac.<p>I hope C# works well under VS Code.

Jet brains Rider is a great replacement (including Copilot integration)

Probably for the best - been a VS developer for many, many years, since the first version - but the Mac version was never even close to as good as the Windows version - as much as I wished it was, as my Mac is my primary machine.<p>They either needed to kill it, or make it at least as good as it was on Windows - guess they decided killing it was easier.

Better link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;visualstudio&#x2F;mac&#x2F;what-happened-to-vs-for-mac?view=vsmac-2022" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;visualstudio&#x2F;mac&#x2F;what-happ...</a>

It&#x27;s just really the rebranded xamarin studio. The real visual studio was never available anyway

In all fairness, having being forced to work on mac recently for a cross platform application, the nuances of the macOs I hear dotNet people complain about are honestly NOTHING compared to how bad the Visual Studio for mac experience is.<p>We tried the Rider trial and it was a far superior experience, but the price wasn&#x27;t justified for our use case.<p>I and others configured nvim to just work, and some others just stuck to vscode with the cli. Not one person wants to use the Visual Studio anymore. It&#x27;s wild how Microsoft missed a great opportunity as I find the machines quite good, and the Windows experience with Visual studio is genuinely impressive.

There was a Visual Studio for Mac?

An older version of the underlying source code remains available: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mono&#x2F;monodevelop">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mono&#x2F;monodevelop</a><p>That said, a comment in one of the open issues indicates that it is incompatible with .NET Core.

This is my primary driver on MacOS. I had no idea they were going to sunset this

I assume they always kept it shitty as to not cannibalize VS Code, which does get a lot of use (obviously it&#x27;s very popular). If you ever used it you&#x27;d see that it doesn&#x27;t feel like normal Windows VS, and it doesn&#x27;t really feel like a good native Mac app either.

One solution to keep on using VS on Mac, for those that are (a) weary of VS Code (b) not willing to change to a (paid) JB Rider, is to use something like Parallels to emulate VS on Windows.

Taking a full 10 seconds to load a solution is… not something to brag about

Anybody using it?

When did Microsoft port visual studio to Mac?

So does this mean no more Mac versions of Excel or word? Or are those written using the Apple development tools?

CodeRunner&#x27;s way better

I wonder how many cumulative calories were expended on the mini anxiety &#x2F; disbelief attacks caused by n number of people momentarily misreading this as &quot;Visual Studio Code&quot; rather than &quot;Visual Studio&quot;.<p>Not that I&#x27;m the biggest VSCode fanboy although I use it constantly. And not that I even own a Mac anymore come to think of it. But still, the wording of this post definitely contributed to global warming.