Visual Studio for Mac

» see visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/mac as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

by the time i would have signed up to visual studio for mac, my work was already happening somewhere else. i was on a linux box doing computer-vision pipelines in python and c++, and the part of microsoft i still touched was vs code, not the full visual studio ide. visual studio for mac was a product for mac developers writing.net or xamarin mobile apps, which is a genuinely small slice of the world. i was never that slice.

the product had a long backstory before microsoft put the visual studio brand on it. monodevelop started in late 2003 as an open-source port of sharpdevelop to gtk on linux. by 2010 the xamarin team had migrated it onto macos and rebranded it as xamarin studio. microsoft bought xamarin in february 2016 to bring c# cross-platform mobile development in-house. that november at the connect developer conference, xamarin studio was relaunched in preview as visual studio for mac, and it hit general availability with visual studio 2017 on may 10 2017.

the seven years that followed were a slow squeeze. vs code grew from a side project into microsoft's primary cross-platform editor. xamarin moved into maui, and maui's tooling story landed in vs code first. on august 30 2023 microsoft announced retirement; the 17.6 build would be the last, supported for twelve more months. on august 31 2024 servicing ended, leaving the install bits available only as legacy downloads on my.visualstudio.com for subscribers.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the inheritance ~

visual studio for mac was built on the mono / monodevelop stack, which is its own multi-decade story. miguel de icaza started the mono project in 2001 as an open-source.net runtime for linux, with monodevelop following in 2003 as its ide. the company ximian (later acquired by novell, eventually spun into xamarin) shipped both for over a decade before microsoft acquired the team in 2016. that lineage is the reason vs for mac never quite matched its windows sibling: it was a different codebase wearing the same logo.

~ the cracks ~

the cocoa rewrite microsoft attempted in 2022 (17.0, native macos rather than gtk-wrapped) ran into stability issues and never reached parity with the windows version. by 2023 the team inside microsoft had visible attrition. when xamarin support ended on may 1 2024, the only remaining use case for visual studio for mac evaporated. the retirement date was four months later.

~ the long tail ~

microsoft's official guidance is to migrate to vs code with the c# dev kit or to run windows visual studio in a vm. neither of those is the same product. the c# dev kit is good but it is vs code, and a vm is not a mac-native ide. the people who liked visual studio for mac specifically (xamarin mobile devs, f# people) have been quietly absorbed back into the platform they were trying to leave.

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