📢 Visual Studio 2022 v17.0 for Mac released

What's new in Visual Studio 2022 v17.0 for Mac

New native macOS UI

Microsoft introduced a new look and feel in Visual Studio for Mac that combines the modern macOS UI with the productive experience you’ve come to know and love in Visual Studio. Some of the most visible changes include:

• Refreshed UI across all tool windows, preferences, and document tabs.
• New light & dark themes that can synchronize with the macOS theme settings.
• A new status bar reporting IDE status in the footer, as well as highlighting the number of warnings or errors in a solution.

Support to run natively on Apple Silicon (ARM64) processors

The IDE now runs natively on Apple Silicon (ARM64) Processor like the M1 processor. This was a top request from customers on our Developer Community site. Among other improvements, large solutions now load up to 50% faster.

Running the IDE on .NET 6

The IDE has moved to run on the .NET 6 runtime when previously it ran on the Mono runtime. In addition to providing performance improvements throughout the product, this also enabled the above work to run the IDE natively on Apple Silicon (ARM64) processors.

Accessibility improvements

As part of the move to fully native macOS UI, accessibility has been improved throughout the IDE:

• Improvements to VoiceOver support across the full feature set.
• The default light and dark themes have been updated to better match macOS colors and improve contrast.

Tool window drag and drop docking experience

Tool windows can be docked (attached to a side of the IDE) by dragging their title and dropping them on top of drop-target icons that appear in the IDE. When dragging the windows, these drop-target icons appear to make it easier to pick a side of the IDE, or window, for placing the tool window.

Multi-caret copy/paste experience

Microsoft improved the multi-caret copy and paste experience in Visual Studio 2022 for Mac. Previously, pasting multiple lines into multiple carets resulted in the entire clipboard being duplicated at each caret. Now, pasting multiple lines into the same number of carets will insert each line to a respective caret.

Git Changes window

This release introduces the Git Changes window from Visual Studio (Windows). As you do your work, Visual Studio for Mac keeps track of the file changes to your project in the Changes section of the Git Changes window. When it nears time to commit your work, you can use this window to review all the changes you've made, stage, and then commit. You can also use this window to stash work, initiate Git push & pull commands, as well as amend a recent commit.

Development with .NET 6

You can now use .NET 6 to build applications console apps or ASP.NET Core solutions for the web or cloud. Visual Studio for Mac supports the latest release of .NET 6 while continuing to enable development with .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5.

Xamarin - Mobile Development

Building Xamarin traditional/Mono-based projects with the Mono-based MSBuild Starting with Visual Studio for Mac 17.0 Preview 7, you may now build using the MSBuild provided by the .NET SDK or MSBuild on Mono.

By default, classic Xamarin projects and SDK-style projects targeting .NET v4.x will be built using MSBuild on Mono.

If your solution contains any project that requires building with MSBuild on Mono all projects in that solution will be built with MSBuild on Mono. This will prevent build errors due to differences in behavior between the two different MSBuilds when classic projects reference SDK-style projects.