On 23 May, Visual Studio 2022 for Mac v17.0 reached general availability, It features a new native macOS UI that runs on .NET 6, and is optimized for Apple Silicon (ARM64) processors. The main objective of this release is to improve the users’ daily development experience which is why it includes a couple of familiar features from Visual Studio (on Windows) like the Git Changes window and subword navigation.
Visual Studio 2022 for Mac v17.0 which is considered to be the fastest version yet is already available for download. On that point, this could mainly be attributed to the fact the front-end UI of the IDE was replaced with a new native macOS UI that runs on .NET 6. Also, if you have noticed, the new release has also been moved up a couple ++ operations so that it can match the version number on other operating systems. It was confusing to have a different version number between products.
Back in March, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2022 for Mac 17.0 Preview 7 which was mainly geared toward providing a high-quality general release as well as addressing bugs that affected the previous versions. Not forgetting, that the release also features the Xamarian mobile tool which was incorporated as a supported experience with the intent of creating additional support for devices running on .NET 6 & M1 processors.
Besides, Visual Studio 2022 for Mac v17.0 reaching general availability they are also shipping a preview version (Visual Studio 2022 for Mac v17.3) for their next update which users can run simultaneously with v17.0. The preview encompasses initial support for .NET 7 development and tooling for .NET MAUI.
Based on the fact that Azure Functions v4 is supported on the new release, users can now develop their own applications by making use of both .NET 6 and C# 10. Although v17.0 GA release does not support .NET MAUI, users can utilize the preview version released alongside it because it “supports cross-platform development for iOS, Android, and macOS apps using .NET 6 and .NET MAUI.” With that, be sure to also check out the roadmap to get a feel of what the preview has in store for you.
