Microsoft has made an announcement that has sent shockwaves in the MacOS community. Merely five years after its launch on the platform, Visual Studio will be discontinued for macOS, and to make things worse, users will only get a one year grace period before they lose any and all access to the tool. If you are using Visual Studio, the latest build version, 17.6, will be the last one, and the one year grace period will be used to seed security updates only.
Microsoft to discontinue Visual Studio for Mac on August 31, 2024
This announcement has caught many off-guard, as just recently, Microsoft made another announcement, stating that Visual Studio 2022 would be embracing the new Apple Silicon, which will be powering Mac devices going forward. But, reports now suggest that after the announcement was made, Microsoft studied the usage patterns of Visual Studio on Mac devices, and found that it does not match their estimate.
Anthony Cangialosi, Microsoft’s DevDiv Group Product Manager, explained, “we’re focusing our efforts on optimizing Visual Studio, accessible through Microsoft Dev Box on any operating system, and the C# Dev Kit for VS Code, which is accessible on any OS.”
Now that the announcement has been made, it is high time developers start looking for alternatives to the beloved IDE, before the sunset date of August 31, 2024.
Microsoft has however, offered alternatives of its own to the Apple developer family –
- They can use the new extensions in Visual Studio Code, which is currently in preview.
- Use Visual Studio IDE for Windows, by employing a virtual machine on their Mac devices.
- Go for any other .NET IDEs in the market.
It is of course, Microsoft’s prerogative to do this with its services, but the majority of the developer community has been left confused and frustrated, as they now have to rethink their strategies once again, after having gained some confidence after Microsoft’s previous reassuring announcements.
