Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2022 for Mac 17.0 Preview 7. The release is centers around providing a “high-quality” general release as well as addressing bugs that affected previous versions, such as crashing issues, keyboard shortcuts not working on es-ES keyboard layout, and program execution problems.
A notable change that comes with this release is the Xamarin mobile tool. The feature is brought back as a supported experience and attempts to introduce Azure Functions V4 tooling. In return, the tool will assist in supporting devices running on .NET 6 & M1 processors.
This work continues from prior previews where we’ve moved the UI of the IDE to fully native macOS UI, running natively on Apple’s M1 (ARM 64) processor, and migrated the IDE to run on top of .NET 6.
With this new release, users can use Azure Functions V4 on both Intel and M1-based machines. Furthermore, both V2 and V3 functions can be open and developed on Intel processors. However, the ability to create projects on V2 or V3 Intel machines is set to be availed in the next release.
Xamarin had made its debut in Visual Studio 2022 when Preview 6 was released, however, its availability was short-lived because the developers felt that it was not yet ready for use. They also needed to work on the bugs that had already been identified at the time.
“Preview 7 comes with nearly 50 bug fixes for the mobile workloads, ranging from fundamentals like fixing Android emulator creation to small papercuts like error message updates! Much of this work has been focused on Xamarin support so you can switch to 17.0 seamlessly when it goes GA, but we’re making progress with .NET MAUI too.” They have also indicated that they have no plans to ship .NET MAUI support with 17.0 GA. They are working towards providing a better MAUI experience, therefore, they will continue to make improvements in the subsequent releases that they will make.
Through this release, they were also able to finish up porting the last of the Preference screens as highlighted below:
- C# Code Formatting (Found in Preferences > Source Code > Code Formatting > C# source code)
- Snippets (Found in Preferences > Text Editor > Code Snippets)
- Behavior panels for CSS, HTML, and JSON (Found in Preferences > Text Editor > Behavior)
- External Tools (Found in Preferences > Environment > External Tools)
Download the preview to test out these new enhancements.
