On Aug 30, 2023, Microsoft announces retirement of Visual Studio for Mac IDE, ending a short-live project of the company. Visual Studio for Mac preview was announced 1 year ago, coming with monthly updates, including Native M1 Processor support and .NET MAUI support on early and late Nov, 2022, but in 2023, there was almost no update about the project. People speculated about the situation when .NET 8 was introduced in Windows but not in Mac, and now the project is officially dead.

Personally, I haven’t used Mac for development for a while and it is acknowledged that beside Visual Studio, there are other IDE solution for Mac users to develop C# and Microsoft-related tech stacks. However, given that there is still a dead silence about Linux-support for MAUI - the latest attempt of Microsoft for cross-platform application interface, I doubt that this is just a single drop in the ocean, but a major movement from Microsoft to go back to what they have done best and reduce involvement in expanding to cross-platform area.

There is no deny that C# and .NET framework has gone a long way from being tightly-coupled to Windows ecosystem to be a popular choice for software and microservice development. Let’s time tell if Microsoft would strike further for platform-independent solutions or would go back to what they were 20 years ago.