Microsoft Announces Retirement of Visual Studio for Mac IDE

On August 30, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio for Mac will be retired, with the current version 17.6 receiving support for only 12 more months until August 31, 2024, after which no further maintenance or services will be provided.

The announcement highlighted that despite sharing the Visual Studio name, the Mac IDE has a completely different origin, tracing back to SharpDevelop (a C# open‑source IDE) which later forked into MonoDevelop, then became Xamarin Studio, and finally was rebranded as Visual Studio for Mac after Microsoft’s acquisition of Xamarin in 2016.

Microsoft’s acquisition turned most of Xamarin’s components open source, but the IDE itself remained closed source, leading to limited code sharing with the Windows version and low adoption among developers.

Developers have criticized Visual Studio for Mac for its lack of features, performance issues, and poor .NET SDK support, noting that it never reached parity with the Windows counterpart and was often considered a niche tool mainly for Xamarin/MAUI development.

In response to the retirement, Microsoft explained that it will focus on improving Visual Studio (accessible via Microsoft Dev Box) and VS Code with the new C# Dev Kit, while also offering three migration paths: using VS Code with C# extensions, running the Windows Visual Studio IDE in a macOS virtual machine, or accessing a cloud‑hosted Windows VS instance through Microsoft Dev Box.

Many developers, however, prefer JetBrains Rider as a more robust cross‑platform .NET IDE, citing better performance and feature completeness.

Reference links: Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac retirement announcement , DevClass analysis , Zhihu discussion .