Visual Studio 2022 for Mac is now available

Today, I’m thrilled to share the news of the general availability (GA) release of Visual Studio 2022 for Mac v17.0 and that it’s available to download now. This is the fastest Visual Studio for Mac version yet with an all new native macOS UI, fully running on .NET 6, and optimized for Apple Silicon (ARM64) processors.

Today, we’re also shipping a preview of our next update to Visual Studio for Mac, which you can install side-by-side with this v17.0 GA release. This preview brings initial support for .NET 7 development, as well as a first look at tooling for .NET MAUI. You can read more about the releases in the v17.0 release notes and preview release notes.

Enjoy a fast & fluid experience

This release swaps out the front-end UI of the IDE with a fully native macOS UI, replacing our previous architecture that combined numerous UI technologies. We also replaced the IDE’s backend by moving to run it on .NET 6. The combination of these two major changes results in the fastest and most responsive release of Visual Studio for Mac yet.

By moving the IDE to run atop .NET 6, we’ve also addressed one of the top requests for the IDE – Visual Studio for Mac now runs natively on Apple Silicon (ARM64) processors. Actions like opening large solutions are now up to 50% faster than in Visual Studio 2019 for Mac.

Build modern applications using .NET 6

With this release you can build applications using .NET 6 and C# 10. Azure Functions v4 is also supported, so you can develop your serverless applications on top of .NET 6.

While Visual Studio for Mac v17.0 doesn’t provide support for .NET MAUI, the new preview release shipping alongside it supports cross-platform development for iOS, Android, and macOS apps using .NET 6 and .NET MAUI.

Leverage more productivity tooling from Visual Studio

Finally, this release focuses on improving your daily development experience by enabling a few familiar features from Visual Studio (on Windows) such as the Git Changes window, tool window drag and drop, and subword navigation.

A new Git Changes window for reviewing and committing your work.

Moving the solution window from the right-side of the IDE to the left-side.

Navigating subwords in the C# editor.

What’s next?

Today, we’re also shipping the first preview of our next release – Visual Studio 2022 for Mac v17.3. You can install this release side-by-side with with the v17.0 release – if you’re already using the v17.0 Preview/RC releases, you can use the Visual Studio > Check for Updates… menu to update to this next preview as well.

This next release is focused on continuing the work we started in v17.0 by delivering a modern development experience for .NET with initial .NET 7 and .NET MAUI tooling. We’ll also be addressing top feedback and completing the move to native UI for a few lesser used, but important, features like the Task/TODO list. You can learn more about plans for this release by reviewing the roadmap and see what’s in Preview 1 by reviewing the release notes.

Also, for those following along… yes we bumped our minor version number up with a couple ++ operations. This is to match the version number of Visual Studio (on Windows) and address feedback that it’s confusing to have different sets of version numbers between products. Our aim going forward is to ship the Visual Studio IDEs on a similar release cadence across operating systems.

Initial support for .NET MAUI tooling

We are excited to share that .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) has shipped GA. Visual Studio 2022 for Mac v17.3 now supports creating new projects, building and deploying .NET MAUI apps to iOS, macOS, and Android, and XAML Hot Reload. We will add more functionality to .NET MAUI projects, including shared project property pages, app publishing support, and .NET Hot Reload (for C# edits), throughout the next releases.

Please submit your feature requests and bug reports through the Help > Report a Problem menu as we work towards an upcoming stable .NET MAUI tooling release!

Thank you!

We couldn’t have made this release happen without you! Thank you to the thousands of developers who have tried and provided feedback on the preview releases over the past year through bug reports, survey responses, and discussions.

Please continue to share your thoughts and keep sending those suggestions or problem reports! You can use the Help > Report a Problem or Help > Provide a Suggestion menus to share feedback, or go to the Visual Studio for Mac Developer Community site to vote for your favorites.