9 ms·

Microsoft is retiring Visual Studio for Mac in 2024

150 points by kaypee901 3y ago

gberger 3y ago
Not to be confused with Visual Studio Code, the text editor, which will remain supported.
- rco8786 3y ago
  > the text editor This is...not a super accurate way to describe VSCode
  - averageRoyalty 3y ago
    Isn't it? I use it daily and that's precisely how I'd describe it.
  - krylon 3y ago
    It's technically correct (which as everyone knows is the best kind of correct), it just, uh, omits a few details for the sake of brevity.
  - outside1234 3y ago
    This was how the Visual Studio crowd inside of Microsoft described it until VSCode basically destroyed their business. :)
    - phillipcarter 3y ago
      I wouldn't use the word destroyed - Visual Studio (Windows) has been a billion-dollar ARR business for a long time, and likely still is. The trajectory is certainly not in favor of it, but there's an utterly massive number of enterprise .NET and C++ devs on Windows who will be using it for a long time.
      - umeshunni 3y ago
        The crazy thing is that - I worked on VS 10 years before you did - and it was at a (near) billion $ ARR back then. So, it looks like it has been a flat business for a long time.
        phillipcarter 3y ago
        Oh, undoubtedly. When I was there the writing was on the wall -- it's got a decade or two more life to it, but it's long peaked on the ARR curve.
        uxp8u61q 3y ago
        That's what happens to mature products. Not everything is a brand new startup that grows 1000% every quarter.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        It's more that Microsoft lost the cross platform war. .NET lost and electron won. They even use it (or their own WebView knockoff) for their own products now. So there's no more need to give .NET away. They just milk the niche market that still depends on it.
        thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
        >> the niche market that still depends on it. That "niche market" likely pulls in billions of dollars from enterprises.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        It does yes but it's no longer a mainstream dev tool really. Which means there is no longer any point in giving it away for free to try and gain more mainstream application marketshare. They tried to displace Java but failed.
        3y ago
    - atonse 3y ago
      I don't know how good VS Code is now (with regards to all the features VS had) mainly cuz I don't code in .NET, but I still miss the powerful tools from VS that I had nearly 20 years ago (for C#), in Ruby, Elixir, etc (and some other languages). The amazing debugging, stepping through, etc that Eclipse and Visual Studio has, were leaps and bounds more superior to all the stuff that was lacking in the simple text editors. LSP has helped tremendously. And there are similar debugging protocols. It's kind of getting there, but again, nearly 20 years ago, I could start up a project and hit the debugger immediately without fiddling around with settings and googling around. And I feel the lack of such good tooling has enabled a whole generation of "print string" debugging (which I totally do now) because we simply can't easily run and step through. Is this other people's experience? Hopefully the debug world is better in Go/Rust land than it is in Elixir/Ruby land.
      - notpushkin 3y ago
        > but again, nearly 20 years ago, I could start up a project and hit the debugger immediately without fiddling around with settings and googling around It's working in VS Code now, too. For popular languages, you just have to install the respective plugin (only TypeScript is builtin), but it's just a click on the prompt. I've been doing lots of Python debugging and it's pretty much a seamless experience.
        atonse 3y ago
        Excellent. I remember C# support for .NET Core was really solid even 6-7 years ago. So for a large number of use cases, they have to be talking about retiring VS eventually too. This multi-process architecture (with language servers, debug servers, remote SSH mode, etc probably making much better use of multiple cores has to be easier to migrate to)
        notpushkin 3y ago
        Yeah. Remote mode is a killer feature IMO (sadly the official implementation is closed source, and there's no support for Docker in unofficial ones – although coincidentally I'm working on this)
  - swatcoder 3y ago
    It’s in the same feature family as emacs, Sublime, Notepad++, etc — all of which are called text editors. They all have extension architectures that expand on what that means, but they all cover the same kind of use cases and they all stop short of traditional Integrated Development Environments. Unless you’re saying that none of the others should be called text editors either (a daunting uphill fight against history), it’s an exactly accurate description.
    - jupp0r 3y ago
      They cover all use cases of traditional IDEs, but you need to edit files instead of clicking through endless menu hierarchies. They also don't tell you what your compiler or build system should be.
    - hateful 3y ago
      VSCode is far superior to the actual Visual Studio in so many ways. It's definitely closer to Visual Studio than it is to Notepad++. On personal note: my company pays for Visual Studio Ultimate + Jetbrains for me and I rarely open it these days and use VSCode 99% of the time.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - globular-toast 3y ago
        Yeah, it's superior to Visual Studio because it's more like Emacs, a text editor. Emacs users saw the benefits of a single text editor a long, long time ago. Back when I started programming it was common for people to use a different IDE per language. There was VS, Eclipse, Dreamweaver etc. I thought that was insane. It's been funny seeing people finally realise the same a decade later.
        no_wizard 3y ago
        counterpoint: JetBrains IDEs are the sweetspot between absolute single purpose IDEs (like Eclipse) and text editors that require plugins to be useful (broadly speaking). I am all in on JetBrains, to be perfectly transparent, but I have yet to see anything come close to the seamless experience I've had with their IDEs
  - belfthrow 3y ago
    From the crappy bolt on things required to make it anywhere close to a decent IDE, it is essentially vim with tons of incompatible plugins that continually conflict one and other.
    - fshr 3y ago
      Can you provide an example of a crappy bolt on or a set of incompatible plugins? I’ve not had that experience and I’ve used it for six or seven languages.
      - wiseowise 3y ago
        Calva and vim plugin. Anything that adds custom shortcuts.
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    It is a text editor. People treat it as an IDE, because it can be made that way with plugins, but fundamentally it is a text editor.
    - a_wild_dandan 3y ago
      A fresh VS Code install has all the usual IDE tools I need for my job (editing, debugging, symbol parsing, etc). Is it still not an IDE? Suppose it was missing something for someone else's workflow. What if we bundled all the extensions needed for most developers into the install? Is it an IDE then? We just need less modularity/more bloat at install? Distinguishing VS Code from IDEs seems so forced and unintuitive to me. What's the point?
      - jacurtis 3y ago
        I've always described VSCode as a text editor with IDE capabilities. I would personally call it a text editor and not an IDE though. If you do a fresh install of VSCode you may notice that almost everything is a plugin. Even basic language support for popular languages like python are technically plugins. Everything you add from there are as well. A true vanilla install of VSCode is truly a text editor. However it was designed really well in that it has a lot of good integrations which make plugins feel almost integrated and natural. Not to mention the plugin process is the smoothest i've seen of any text editor so for many people it is transparent, they just think they are enabling features and don't realize they are actually just downloading 3,000 plugins. I'm not trying to argue a no-true-scottsman here. If people want to call it an IDE they can. But download something from JetBrains and give that a go or something like xCode or the real Visual Studio and you'll see how deeply "integrated" it is, so that it feels like a full featured developer environment from the start, hence the IDE moniker. There's nothing wrong with VSCode. You can do your whole job in it i'm sure. But compare it to something like JetBrains and it is really really hard to put them truly next to eachother. With enough customization you can get VSCode close, but it sure isn't like that without a lot of customization and plugins from 100 different developers with varying levels of support and reliability. Fwiw, the Wikipedia page for Visual Studio calls it an IDE and the wikipedia page for VSCode calls it a "source code editor". So maybe as a "source code editor", thats where it bridges the gap between IDE and Text Editor.
  - irrational 3y ago
    It is not integrated, so it is not an IDE. Text editor seems like the best description for it.
    - IshKebab 3y ago
      It does have an integrated debugger, build systems, code intelligence, refactoring tools, and version control. What other things need to be integrated before it can be blessed as an IDE?
      - tomjen3 3y ago
        Does it or are they available as a plugin?
        IshKebab 3y ago
        Yes. These features are directly supported by VSCode. They aren't added via plugins. Support for specific languages/debuggers/build systems is provided by extensions. Look up how LSP and DAP work for example. A hugely successful extensible IDE system.
      - hateful 3y ago
        This is what I'm saying! At the risk of ad hominum - I feel like a lot of the comments classifying VSCode as merely a text editor haven't really used it for development - at least not directly or in a long time. Though this whole thread could really be considered off-topic since the original post is about Visual Studio for Mac!
- jug 3y ago
  With Microsoft backtracking on their Visual Studio non-Code designer interface and no longer offering it for modern Windows apps (WinUI 3)… Honestly… Is this a long term plan to just sunset Visual Studio? It always felt like it to me. From the get go. But they deny it. Still, Visual Studio is so heavy, feels sluggish, written in WPF, and not from an era of modern, plugin-based software development. Visual Studio Code also offers many features VS don’t. Oh, and it perfectly debugged Python code on Windows for me (VS somehow failed to attach its debugger to Python.exe) and auto-detected venv’s for me from the mere folder structure, none of which Visual Studio did. Code feels like the .NET Core of Microsoft editors to me. Not only new thing for cross-platform development, but the next thing for Windows development too. Just like .NET Core. Sure, Code still miss things but those only feel like extensions away at best. A far better and less monolithic design. Now, if we could only have it be WebView2 based rather than Electron on Windows and cut 50% RAM use right off the bat…
  - delfinom 3y ago
    Dunno man, to me VSCode feels sluggish. It takes a significant amount of clicks debugging C++. I can't just have the file and debug views present at the same time, I have to keep jumping back and forth. The launch json config system also introduced a ridiculous amount of verbosity, not to mention it's insanely easy to multi launch instances and confuse yourself.
  - alexvoda 3y ago
    The WPF version of VS has supported many plugins from the start (2010). The previous version (2003-2008) also supported plugins but not sure how extensively. Before that VS was just the name for a suite of different tools (Visual C++, Visual Basic, Visual InterDev and a few others).
    - jug 3y ago
      Absolutely but it just feels like VS Code has taken the extension based model even more to its heart. I think the difference was striking when I first started using it. What would be bundled with VS is often just an extension in Code. It’s wholly language agnostic in that regard. Even JavaScript, Python or their own C# requires an extension for anything but the lightest support such as syntax. It’s based around linters and language servers, often outsourced to third parties to relieve Microsoft of the burden besides their own technologies. It just comes across as the more sensible way to build an editor or IDE without overwhelming your own team and making it more maintainable in the long run. And ultimately that this will even show up in the quality of the product they market itself.
verdverm 3y ago
Better link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/mac/what-happened-to-vs-for-mac?view=vsmac-2022 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/mac/what-happ...
yodon 3y ago
Jet brains Rider is a great replacement (including Copilot integration)
- leosanchez 3y ago
  If you are using linux it is the only solution.
- lizardking 3y ago
  Seconded. It’s my daily driver for back end .net development on mac. I’ve experimented with the new vs code extensions, but the experience still isn’t as smooth as using a proper IDE.
- Yabood 3y ago
  Agreed. Been using for a few years and have zero complaints.
- biglyburrito 3y ago
  JetBrains Rider on macOS is almost as good as Visual Studio 2022 on Windows. And JetBrains DataGrip is by far the best database IDE on macOS or Windows; going back from it to SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) recently was painful.
  - sumedh 3y ago
    SSMS has a unique feature where if you run multiple queries, it will show the output of all those queries below at the same time, you cannot do that with Datagrip.
    - bdcravens 3y ago
      SSMS also has a number of excellent integrations with SQL Server itself. Overall, DataGrip is my tool of choice, but I occasionally boot up Windows in Parallels when I need some of the SSMS-specific tools.
    - ozim 3y ago
ZanyProgrammer 3y ago
I assume they always kept it shitty as to not cannibalize VS Code, which does get a lot of use (obviously it's very popular). If you ever used it you'd see that it doesn't feel like normal Windows VS, and it doesn't really feel like a good native Mac app either.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  This is because it wasn't originally a visual studio product. This is just the name they gave Xamarin Studio after the company was acquired by Microsoft.
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  What? Isn't Visual Studio a paid product (aside from the Community edition)? VS Code is free, so if anything, they would keep VS Code as the shitty product.
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    Visual Studio for Mac was also free. It also wasn't developed in house, it's just Xamarin Studio with a new name. I think they are killing it for two reasons: * Cross-platform .NET development on VS Code has gotten very good. * JetBrains Rider is even better, especially for professionals, and becoming very hard to compete with.
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    > if anything, they would keep VS Code as the shitty product. Getting VS Code as popular as it is today was the strategy. For that, it needed to not be shitty. The enshittification only began after they took over the market
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  > I assume they always kept it shitty as to not cannibalize VS Code, What a strange take. Why wouldn't they rather not create it in the first place if they were so worried about cannibalizing their free product by ... another free product?
harshalizee 3y ago
This is my primary driver on MacOS. I had no idea they were going to sunset this
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  You may be confusing it with Visual Studio Code, also called VS Code. Yeah, it’s not confusing at all.
- jakv 3y ago
  I found the news out by the little announcement banner at the top of the app when I opened it.
ejb999 3y ago
Probably for the best - been a VS developer for many, many years, since the first version - but the Mac version was never even close to as good as the Windows version - as much as I wished it was, as my Mac is my primary machine. They either needed to kill it, or make it at least as good as it was on Windows - guess they decided killing it was easier.
- pif 3y ago
  > the Mac version was never even close to as good as the Windows version Care to add any detail, and reason?
  - TheCleric 3y ago
    It couldn't do a LOT of the same things that the Windows version could do. For me the deal breaker was no SSIS package editing.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    Because the VS version for macOS is essentially just MonoDevelop.
  - chedabob 3y ago
    It shared nothing with Visual Studio apart from the name as it was just a rebrand of MonoDevelop. I tried to use it on a Xamarin project a few years ago, and between the poor autocomplete and frequent crashes, I switched to JetBrains Rider for everything but XAML editing. There were also features that were locked behind a $250/month Enterprise subscription which other IDEs provide for free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonoDevelop#Visual_Studio_for_Mac https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonoDevelop#Visual_Studio_for_...
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Never really made sense that they offered it at all. The number of .NET shops that have their developers on Macs has got to be quite small.
  - 3y ago
gnabgib 3y ago
Previously (with comment volume): "Visual Studio for Mac Retirement Announcement" (39 points, 2 months ago, 7 comments)[0], "Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac after major overhaul" (116 points, 111 comments)[1], JetBrains also did 65% discount when it was first announced [over now] (56 points, 64 comments)[2] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37325427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37325427 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37326419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37326419 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37369946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37369946
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wkat4242 3y ago
It's just really the rebranded xamarin studio. The real visual studio was never available anyway
riwsky 3y ago
There was a Visual Studio for Mac?
- Dudester230602 3y ago
  They were desperate to attract more devs who don't care about Microsoft anyways so they started throwing things at wall to see what will stick. VS for Mac did not, but Chrome browser masquerading as a text editor did.
- duped 3y ago
  It was originally called MonoDevelop, then Xamarin Studio, and then rebranded as Visual Studio for Mac, to the confusion of everyone.
fredsmith219 3y ago
So does this mean no more Mac versions of Excel or word? Or are those written using the Apple development tools?
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  The announcement has nothing to do with Excel and Word.
pkdpic 3y ago
I wonder how many cumulative calories were expended on the mini anxiety / disbelief attacks caused by n number of people momentarily misreading this as "Visual Studio Code" rather than "Visual Studio". Not that I'm the biggest VSCode fanboy although I use it constantly. And not that I even own a Mac anymore come to think of it. But still, the wording of this post definitely contributed to global warming.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Id say not a single one. No one would believe Microsoft was going to kill VSCode
gwbas1c 3y ago
Visual Studio for Mac had its roots in Xamarian Studio, which had its roots in MonoDevelop. Each one has always been a rebrand of the previous product. (Edit: I forgot to point out that Visual Studio for Mac never appeared to be a port. It always appeared to be a "clone" of Visual Studio with a very similar UI.) They've always been rather buggy and unstable compared to Visual Studio on Windows. They were a nice way to do C# on Mac without needing to load a VM; and for the last few years I really appreciated that C# was getting "first class" support on Mac. I hope C# works well under VS Code.
- Jare 3y ago
  Last I remember, you still need a Visual Studio license to use the C# plugins for VSCode. (free for personal use etc) They're all part of the package, whether Visual Studio itself exists or not.
- Pulcinella 3y ago
  Yep. Hence the somewhat confusing name of the software. It's not Visual Studio™ for macOS. It's Visual Studio for Mac™. How well does VSCode work with the Unity engine? My understanding was that for game C# programming on macOS Unity recommended(required?) Visual Studio for Mac™.
namegulf 3y ago
Anybody using it?
Obscurity4340 3y ago
CodeRunner's way better
xz18r 3y ago
One solution to keep on using VS on Mac, for those that are (a) weary of VS Code (b) not willing to change to a (paid) JB Rider, is to use something like Parallels to emulate VS on Windows.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  The principal use case was to build Mac apps using Xamarin, something that really isn't possible in Visual Studio on Windows.
- rokkitmensch 3y ago
  Visual Studio under Parallels requires an unholy amount of compute, and those poor schmucks like me consigned to true cross platform development work are currently stranded (last I checked at least) waiting for ARM Windows and Parallels blessings to run behemoths like the adult Visual Studio (ignoring and discounting completely the modern shambling impostor).
  - bigtex 3y ago
    VS 2019 runs fine for me under parallels for older net framework applications. SSIS package ui rendering is slower and clunky but gets the job done. 2022 now has an ARM version that is speedy but the last time I used it was slow to get plugins for ssis and ssrs packages. I do all my net core development in Rider and DataGrip for Mac and only use Ssms for server administration work. Rider is just insanely fast on arm Mac’s and puts VS 2022 to shame on similar intel hardware.
bilekas 3y ago
In all fairness, having being forced to work on mac recently for a cross platform application, the nuances of the macOs I hear dotNet people complain about are honestly NOTHING compared to how bad the Visual Studio for mac experience is. We tried the Rider trial and it was a far superior experience, but the price wasn't justified for our use case. I and others configured nvim to just work, and some others just stuck to vscode with the cli. Not one person wants to use the Visual Studio anymore. It's wild how Microsoft missed a great opportunity as I find the machines quite good, and the Windows experience with Visual studio is genuinely impressive.
- nvy 3y ago
  >having being forced to work on mac recently for a cross platform application, the nuances of the macOs I hear dotNet people complain about Can you elaborate? I've done some dotnet work on macOS and it wasn't materially different from working on Linux, in my experience.
  - TheCleric 3y ago
    Having lead a team of .NET developers who were slowly being moved that direction (as they were the only .NET devs in the company) here were some of the major hangups: 1) A lot of it is just muscle memory that doesn't work in MacOS. Can't do Ctrl+C, it's Cmd+c. Figuring out the equivalents of things you haven't even thought about doing in a decade can be tough. 2) Not all, but many of them only knew how to work via GUI. Visual Studio for Mac does enable you to do most of that, but learning new stuff like Node requires you to drop into a command line, and more than a few felt like that was way less intuitive and easy to use. They preferred menus you can click through over man pages. 3) A surprising one: case sensitivity. Windows doesn't care, but Mac does for things like filenames. This in combination with 2 would mean there would be some frustration as to why the OS couldn't find a file that was "right there". 4) A lot of them (I'd venture to say all of the ones I was in charge of) were still in .NET mostly because they had gotten comfortable with it, and weren't particularly invested in learning something new unless they had to. So of course throwing a whole new OS at someone with this mindset would be a little frustrating. 5) Building off of #4: some of the old guard came up when Macs were something you bought for the graphics designers and "real" developers used Windows. So they would still crack jokes about having to use a "Crapintosh" without realizing how powerful the ecosystem has become.
rayiner 3y ago
When did Microsoft port visual studio to Mac?
- krylon 3y ago
  They didn't, it was a rebranded version of MonoDevelop, which is an entirely different codebase.
tech234a 3y ago
An older version of the underlying source code remains available: https://github.com/mono/monodevelop https://github.com/mono/monodevelop That said, a comment in one of the open issues indicates that it is incompatible with .NET Core.
zaps 3y ago
Taking a full 10 seconds to load a solution is… not something to brag about

150 points by kaypee901 3y ago

gberger 3y ago

Not to be confused with Visual Studio Code, the text editor, which will remain supported.

rco8786 3y ago
> the text editor This is...not a super accurate way to describe VSCode
- averageRoyalty 3y ago
  Isn't it? I use it daily and that's precisely how I'd describe it.
- krylon 3y ago
  It's technically correct (which as everyone knows is the best kind of correct), it just, uh, omits a few details for the sake of brevity.
- outside1234 3y ago
  This was how the Visual Studio crowd inside of Microsoft described it until VSCode basically destroyed their business. :)
  - phillipcarter 3y ago
    I wouldn't use the word destroyed - Visual Studio (Windows) has been a billion-dollar ARR business for a long time, and likely still is. The trajectory is certainly not in favor of it, but there's an utterly massive number of enterprise .NET and C++ devs on Windows who will be using it for a long time.
    - umeshunni 3y ago
      The crazy thing is that - I worked on VS 10 years before you did - and it was at a (near) billion $ ARR back then. So, it looks like it has been a flat business for a long time.
      - phillipcarter 3y ago
        Oh, undoubtedly. When I was there the writing was on the wall -- it's got a decade or two more life to it, but it's long peaked on the ARR curve.
      - uxp8u61q 3y ago
        That's what happens to mature products. Not everything is a brand new startup that grows 1000% every quarter.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        It's more that Microsoft lost the cross platform war. .NET lost and electron won. They even use it (or their own WebView knockoff) for their own products now. So there's no more need to give .NET away. They just milk the niche market that still depends on it.
        thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
        >> the niche market that still depends on it. That "niche market" likely pulls in billions of dollars from enterprises.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        It does yes but it's no longer a mainstream dev tool really. Which means there is no longer any point in giving it away for free to try and gain more mainstream application marketshare. They tried to displace Java but failed.
        3y ago
  - atonse 3y ago
    I don't know how good VS Code is now (with regards to all the features VS had) mainly cuz I don't code in .NET, but I still miss the powerful tools from VS that I had nearly 20 years ago (for C#), in Ruby, Elixir, etc (and some other languages). The amazing debugging, stepping through, etc that Eclipse and Visual Studio has, were leaps and bounds more superior to all the stuff that was lacking in the simple text editors. LSP has helped tremendously. And there are similar debugging protocols. It's kind of getting there, but again, nearly 20 years ago, I could start up a project and hit the debugger immediately without fiddling around with settings and googling around. And I feel the lack of such good tooling has enabled a whole generation of "print string" debugging (which I totally do now) because we simply can't easily run and step through. Is this other people's experience? Hopefully the debug world is better in Go/Rust land than it is in Elixir/Ruby land.
    - notpushkin 3y ago
      > but again, nearly 20 years ago, I could start up a project and hit the debugger immediately without fiddling around with settings and googling around It's working in VS Code now, too. For popular languages, you just have to install the respective plugin (only TypeScript is builtin), but it's just a click on the prompt. I've been doing lots of Python debugging and it's pretty much a seamless experience.
      - atonse 3y ago
        Excellent. I remember C# support for .NET Core was really solid even 6-7 years ago. So for a large number of use cases, they have to be talking about retiring VS eventually too. This multi-process architecture (with language servers, debug servers, remote SSH mode, etc probably making much better use of multiple cores has to be easier to migrate to)
        notpushkin 3y ago
        Yeah. Remote mode is a killer feature IMO (sadly the official implementation is closed source, and there's no support for Docker in unofficial ones – although coincidentally I'm working on this)
- swatcoder 3y ago
  It’s in the same feature family as emacs, Sublime, Notepad++, etc — all of which are called text editors. They all have extension architectures that expand on what that means, but they all cover the same kind of use cases and they all stop short of traditional Integrated Development Environments. Unless you’re saying that none of the others should be called text editors either (a daunting uphill fight against history), it’s an exactly accurate description.
  - jupp0r 3y ago
    They cover all use cases of traditional IDEs, but you need to edit files instead of clicking through endless menu hierarchies. They also don't tell you what your compiler or build system should be.
  - hateful 3y ago
    VSCode is far superior to the actual Visual Studio in so many ways. It's definitely closer to Visual Studio than it is to Notepad++. On personal note: my company pays for Visual Studio Ultimate + Jetbrains for me and I rarely open it these days and use VSCode 99% of the time.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - globular-toast 3y ago
      Yeah, it's superior to Visual Studio because it's more like Emacs, a text editor. Emacs users saw the benefits of a single text editor a long, long time ago. Back when I started programming it was common for people to use a different IDE per language. There was VS, Eclipse, Dreamweaver etc. I thought that was insane. It's been funny seeing people finally realise the same a decade later.
      - no_wizard 3y ago
        counterpoint: JetBrains IDEs are the sweetspot between absolute single purpose IDEs (like Eclipse) and text editors that require plugins to be useful (broadly speaking). I am all in on JetBrains, to be perfectly transparent, but I have yet to see anything come close to the seamless experience I've had with their IDEs
- belfthrow 3y ago
  From the crappy bolt on things required to make it anywhere close to a decent IDE, it is essentially vim with tons of incompatible plugins that continually conflict one and other.
  - fshr 3y ago
    Can you provide an example of a crappy bolt on or a set of incompatible plugins? I’ve not had that experience and I’ve used it for six or seven languages.
    - wiseowise 3y ago
      Calva and vim plugin. Anything that adds custom shortcuts.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  It is a text editor. People treat it as an IDE, because it can be made that way with plugins, but fundamentally it is a text editor.
  - a_wild_dandan 3y ago
    A fresh VS Code install has all the usual IDE tools I need for my job (editing, debugging, symbol parsing, etc). Is it still not an IDE? Suppose it was missing something for someone else's workflow. What if we bundled all the extensions needed for most developers into the install? Is it an IDE then? We just need less modularity/more bloat at install? Distinguishing VS Code from IDEs seems so forced and unintuitive to me. What's the point?
    - jacurtis 3y ago
      I've always described VSCode as a text editor with IDE capabilities. I would personally call it a text editor and not an IDE though. If you do a fresh install of VSCode you may notice that almost everything is a plugin. Even basic language support for popular languages like python are technically plugins. Everything you add from there are as well. A true vanilla install of VSCode is truly a text editor. However it was designed really well in that it has a lot of good integrations which make plugins feel almost integrated and natural. Not to mention the plugin process is the smoothest i've seen of any text editor so for many people it is transparent, they just think they are enabling features and don't realize they are actually just downloading 3,000 plugins. I'm not trying to argue a no-true-scottsman here. If people want to call it an IDE they can. But download something from JetBrains and give that a go or something like xCode or the real Visual Studio and you'll see how deeply "integrated" it is, so that it feels like a full featured developer environment from the start, hence the IDE moniker. There's nothing wrong with VSCode. You can do your whole job in it i'm sure. But compare it to something like JetBrains and it is really really hard to put them truly next to eachother. With enough customization you can get VSCode close, but it sure isn't like that without a lot of customization and plugins from 100 different developers with varying levels of support and reliability. Fwiw, the Wikipedia page for Visual Studio calls it an IDE and the wikipedia page for VSCode calls it a "source code editor". So maybe as a "source code editor", thats where it bridges the gap between IDE and Text Editor.
- irrational 3y ago
  It is not integrated, so it is not an IDE. Text editor seems like the best description for it.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    It does have an integrated debugger, build systems, code intelligence, refactoring tools, and version control. What other things need to be integrated before it can be blessed as an IDE?
    - tomjen3 3y ago
      Does it or are they available as a plugin?
      - IshKebab 3y ago
        Yes. These features are directly supported by VSCode. They aren't added via plugins. Support for specific languages/debuggers/build systems is provided by extensions. Look up how LSP and DAP work for example. A hugely successful extensible IDE system.
    - hateful 3y ago
      This is what I'm saying! At the risk of ad hominum - I feel like a lot of the comments classifying VSCode as merely a text editor haven't really used it for development - at least not directly or in a long time. Though this whole thread could really be considered off-topic since the original post is about Visual Studio for Mac!
jug 3y ago
With Microsoft backtracking on their Visual Studio non-Code designer interface and no longer offering it for modern Windows apps (WinUI 3)… Honestly… Is this a long term plan to just sunset Visual Studio? It always felt like it to me. From the get go. But they deny it. Still, Visual Studio is so heavy, feels sluggish, written in WPF, and not from an era of modern, plugin-based software development. Visual Studio Code also offers many features VS don’t. Oh, and it perfectly debugged Python code on Windows for me (VS somehow failed to attach its debugger to Python.exe) and auto-detected venv’s for me from the mere folder structure, none of which Visual Studio did. Code feels like the .NET Core of Microsoft editors to me. Not only new thing for cross-platform development, but the next thing for Windows development too. Just like .NET Core. Sure, Code still miss things but those only feel like extensions away at best. A far better and less monolithic design. Now, if we could only have it be WebView2 based rather than Electron on Windows and cut 50% RAM use right off the bat…
- delfinom 3y ago
  Dunno man, to me VSCode feels sluggish. It takes a significant amount of clicks debugging C++. I can't just have the file and debug views present at the same time, I have to keep jumping back and forth. The launch json config system also introduced a ridiculous amount of verbosity, not to mention it's insanely easy to multi launch instances and confuse yourself.
- alexvoda 3y ago
  The WPF version of VS has supported many plugins from the start (2010). The previous version (2003-2008) also supported plugins but not sure how extensively. Before that VS was just the name for a suite of different tools (Visual C++, Visual Basic, Visual InterDev and a few others).
  - jug 3y ago
    Absolutely but it just feels like VS Code has taken the extension based model even more to its heart. I think the difference was striking when I first started using it. What would be bundled with VS is often just an extension in Code. It’s wholly language agnostic in that regard. Even JavaScript, Python or their own C# requires an extension for anything but the lightest support such as syntax. It’s based around linters and language servers, often outsourced to third parties to relieve Microsoft of the burden besides their own technologies. It just comes across as the more sensible way to build an editor or IDE without overwhelming your own team and making it more maintainable in the long run. And ultimately that this will even show up in the quality of the product they market itself.

verdverm 3y ago

Better link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/mac/what-happened-to-vs-for-mac?view=vsmac-2022 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/mac/what-happ...

yodon 3y ago

Jet brains Rider is a great replacement (including Copilot integration)

leosanchez 3y ago
If you are using linux it is the only solution.
lizardking 3y ago
Seconded. It’s my daily driver for back end .net development on mac. I’ve experimented with the new vs code extensions, but the experience still isn’t as smooth as using a proper IDE.
Yabood 3y ago
Agreed. Been using for a few years and have zero complaints.
biglyburrito 3y ago
JetBrains Rider on macOS is almost as good as Visual Studio 2022 on Windows. And JetBrains DataGrip is by far the best database IDE on macOS or Windows; going back from it to SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) recently was painful.
- sumedh 3y ago
  SSMS has a unique feature where if you run multiple queries, it will show the output of all those queries below at the same time, you cannot do that with Datagrip.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    SSMS also has a number of excellent integrations with SQL Server itself. Overall, DataGrip is my tool of choice, but I occasionally boot up Windows in Parallels when I need some of the SSMS-specific tools.
  - ozim 3y ago

ZanyProgrammer 3y ago

I assume they always kept it shitty as to not cannibalize VS Code, which does get a lot of use (obviously it's very popular). If you ever used it you'd see that it doesn't feel like normal Windows VS, and it doesn't really feel like a good native Mac app either.

babypuncher 3y ago
This is because it wasn't originally a visual studio product. This is just the name they gave Xamarin Studio after the company was acquired by Microsoft.
theandrewbailey 3y ago
What? Isn't Visual Studio a paid product (aside from the Community edition)? VS Code is free, so if anything, they would keep VS Code as the shitty product.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  Visual Studio for Mac was also free. It also wasn't developed in house, it's just Xamarin Studio with a new name. I think they are killing it for two reasons: * Cross-platform .NET development on VS Code has gotten very good. * JetBrains Rider is even better, especially for professionals, and becoming very hard to compete with.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  > if anything, they would keep VS Code as the shitty product. Getting VS Code as popular as it is today was the strategy. For that, it needed to not be shitty. The enshittification only began after they took over the market
The_Colonel 3y ago
> I assume they always kept it shitty as to not cannibalize VS Code, What a strange take. Why wouldn't they rather not create it in the first place if they were so worried about cannibalizing their free product by ... another free product?

harshalizee 3y ago

This is my primary driver on MacOS. I had no idea they were going to sunset this

tambourine_man 3y ago
You may be confusing it with Visual Studio Code, also called VS Code. Yeah, it’s not confusing at all.
jakv 3y ago
I found the news out by the little announcement banner at the top of the app when I opened it.

ejb999 3y ago

Probably for the best - been a VS developer for many, many years, since the first version - but the Mac version was never even close to as good as the Windows version - as much as I wished it was, as my Mac is my primary machine. They either needed to kill it, or make it at least as good as it was on Windows - guess they decided killing it was easier.

pif 3y ago
> the Mac version was never even close to as good as the Windows version Care to add any detail, and reason?
- TheCleric 3y ago
  It couldn't do a LOT of the same things that the Windows version could do. For me the deal breaker was no SSIS package editing.
- sgjohnson 3y ago
  Because the VS version for macOS is essentially just MonoDevelop.
- chedabob 3y ago
  It shared nothing with Visual Studio apart from the name as it was just a rebrand of MonoDevelop. I tried to use it on a Xamarin project a few years ago, and between the poor autocomplete and frequent crashes, I switched to JetBrains Rider for everything but XAML editing. There were also features that were locked behind a $250/month Enterprise subscription which other IDEs provide for free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonoDevelop#Visual_Studio_for_Mac https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonoDevelop#Visual_Studio_for_...
SoftTalker 3y ago
Never really made sense that they offered it at all. The number of .NET shops that have their developers on Macs has got to be quite small.
- 3y ago

gnabgib 3y ago

Previously (with comment volume): "Visual Studio for Mac Retirement Announcement" (39 points, 2 months ago, 7 comments)[0], "Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac after major overhaul" (116 points, 111 comments)[1], JetBrains also did 65% discount when it was first announced [over now] (56 points, 64 comments)[2] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37325427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37325427 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37326419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37326419 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37369946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37369946

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wkat4242 3y ago

It's just really the rebranded xamarin studio. The real visual studio was never available anyway

riwsky 3y ago

There was a Visual Studio for Mac?

Dudester230602 3y ago
They were desperate to attract more devs who don't care about Microsoft anyways so they started throwing things at wall to see what will stick. VS for Mac did not, but Chrome browser masquerading as a text editor did.
duped 3y ago
It was originally called MonoDevelop, then Xamarin Studio, and then rebranded as Visual Studio for Mac, to the confusion of everyone.

fredsmith219 3y ago

So does this mean no more Mac versions of Excel or word? Or are those written using the Apple development tools?

gwbas1c 3y ago
The announcement has nothing to do with Excel and Word.

pkdpic 3y ago

I wonder how many cumulative calories were expended on the mini anxiety / disbelief attacks caused by n number of people momentarily misreading this as "Visual Studio Code" rather than "Visual Studio". Not that I'm the biggest VSCode fanboy although I use it constantly. And not that I even own a Mac anymore come to think of it. But still, the wording of this post definitely contributed to global warming.

edgyquant 3y ago
Id say not a single one. No one would believe Microsoft was going to kill VSCode

gwbas1c 3y ago

Visual Studio for Mac had its roots in Xamarian Studio, which had its roots in MonoDevelop. Each one has always been a rebrand of the previous product. (Edit: I forgot to point out that Visual Studio for Mac never appeared to be a port. It always appeared to be a "clone" of Visual Studio with a very similar UI.) They've always been rather buggy and unstable compared to Visual Studio on Windows. They were a nice way to do C# on Mac without needing to load a VM; and for the last few years I really appreciated that C# was getting "first class" support on Mac. I hope C# works well under VS Code.

Jare 3y ago
Last I remember, you still need a Visual Studio license to use the C# plugins for VSCode. (free for personal use etc) They're all part of the package, whether Visual Studio itself exists or not.
Pulcinella 3y ago
Yep. Hence the somewhat confusing name of the software. It's not Visual Studio™ for macOS. It's Visual Studio for Mac™. How well does VSCode work with the Unity engine? My understanding was that for game C# programming on macOS Unity recommended(required?) Visual Studio for Mac™.

namegulf 3y ago

Anybody using it?

Obscurity4340 3y ago

CodeRunner's way better

xz18r 3y ago

One solution to keep on using VS on Mac, for those that are (a) weary of VS Code (b) not willing to change to a (paid) JB Rider, is to use something like Parallels to emulate VS on Windows.

bdcravens 3y ago
The principal use case was to build Mac apps using Xamarin, something that really isn't possible in Visual Studio on Windows.
rokkitmensch 3y ago
Visual Studio under Parallels requires an unholy amount of compute, and those poor schmucks like me consigned to true cross platform development work are currently stranded (last I checked at least) waiting for ARM Windows and Parallels blessings to run behemoths like the adult Visual Studio (ignoring and discounting completely the modern shambling impostor).
- bigtex 3y ago
  VS 2019 runs fine for me under parallels for older net framework applications. SSIS package ui rendering is slower and clunky but gets the job done. 2022 now has an ARM version that is speedy but the last time I used it was slow to get plugins for ssis and ssrs packages. I do all my net core development in Rider and DataGrip for Mac and only use Ssms for server administration work. Rider is just insanely fast on arm Mac’s and puts VS 2022 to shame on similar intel hardware.

bilekas 3y ago

In all fairness, having being forced to work on mac recently for a cross platform application, the nuances of the macOs I hear dotNet people complain about are honestly NOTHING compared to how bad the Visual Studio for mac experience is. We tried the Rider trial and it was a far superior experience, but the price wasn't justified for our use case. I and others configured nvim to just work, and some others just stuck to vscode with the cli. Not one person wants to use the Visual Studio anymore. It's wild how Microsoft missed a great opportunity as I find the machines quite good, and the Windows experience with Visual studio is genuinely impressive.

nvy 3y ago
>having being forced to work on mac recently for a cross platform application, the nuances of the macOs I hear dotNet people complain about Can you elaborate? I've done some dotnet work on macOS and it wasn't materially different from working on Linux, in my experience.
- TheCleric 3y ago
  Having lead a team of .NET developers who were slowly being moved that direction (as they were the only .NET devs in the company) here were some of the major hangups: 1) A lot of it is just muscle memory that doesn't work in MacOS. Can't do Ctrl+C, it's Cmd+c. Figuring out the equivalents of things you haven't even thought about doing in a decade can be tough. 2) Not all, but many of them only knew how to work via GUI. Visual Studio for Mac does enable you to do most of that, but learning new stuff like Node requires you to drop into a command line, and more than a few felt like that was way less intuitive and easy to use. They preferred menus you can click through over man pages. 3) A surprising one: case sensitivity. Windows doesn't care, but Mac does for things like filenames. This in combination with 2 would mean there would be some frustration as to why the OS couldn't find a file that was "right there". 4) A lot of them (I'd venture to say all of the ones I was in charge of) were still in .NET mostly because they had gotten comfortable with it, and weren't particularly invested in learning something new unless they had to. So of course throwing a whole new OS at someone with this mindset would be a little frustrating. 5) Building off of #4: some of the old guard came up when Macs were something you bought for the graphics designers and "real" developers used Windows. So they would still crack jokes about having to use a "Crapintosh" without realizing how powerful the ecosystem has become.

rayiner 3y ago

When did Microsoft port visual studio to Mac?

krylon 3y ago
They didn't, it was a rebranded version of MonoDevelop, which is an entirely different codebase.

tech234a 3y ago

An older version of the underlying source code remains available: https://github.com/mono/monodevelop https://github.com/mono/monodevelop That said, a comment in one of the open issues indicates that it is incompatible with .NET Core.

zaps 3y ago

Taking a full 10 seconds to load a solution is… not something to brag about