Microsoft Pulls the Plug
A little over a month ago, Microsoft announced the retirement of Visual Studio for Mac in their devblog. The plan is to continue support for the popular IDE for one more year, bringing Visual Studio for Mac to its last breath on August 31st, 2024. This may have come to a surprise to you Mac-based developers out there, but was it really unexpected?
The last time I used Visual Studio for Mac was about a year ago, and I can vividly recall how frustrating I found the IDE to be in contrast with its Windows counterpart. It is/was too minimalistic to the point that it affected my productivity. Regular tools weren’t so quickly at my disposal. I felt like I was being forced to learn a new IDE when I was already familiar with VS 2022 on Windows machines. To efficiently build a .NET application, I expect all the necessary tools to be conveniently available.
Speaking of .NET, it seems to me that Microsoft is increasing its focus on Visual Studio Code. Recently, they announced the C# Dev Kit for VS Code to help Mac developers become less reliant on the soon-to-be-retired Visual Studio. VS Code is an excellent code editor that I happily use for almost everything, and its consistent enhancements cater to cross-platform development. I genuinely appreciate the C# Dev Kit.
According to Visual Studio Magazine, Visual Studio Code remains the preferred IDE among all developers, at a whopping 81 percent of developers this year. Developers want a comfortable, productive environment where they can write elegant code and do their best work. For some of us that may be VIM, Sublime Text, or some obscure editor no one thinks about. Nevertheless, we want a canvas that provokes us to begin programming.
Microsoft Learn documentation and the new freeCodeCamp + Microsoft C# Foundations course have also prioritized Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit for its self-guided learning modules, which, to me, is indicative of the future direction of .NET productivity. I look forward to it.
Written by Alex Graden
Editor for EngineerWorld.org