Microsoft announced this week that the first preview release of Visual Studio 2022 for Mac is now available for testing.

“Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview 1 is now available,” Microsoft’s Jordan Matthiesen writes. “This is the first public release of our .NET IDE with a refreshed, fully native macOS UI.”

Visual Studio 2022 is a native Mac app and it features a completely redesigned user interface with support for Dark and Light themes and assistive technologies. It also arrives with dramatic performance improvements and a redesigned Git Changes window that is more consistent with Visual Studio on Windows.

With an eye to the future, Visual Studio 2022 for Mac support creating .NET 6 apps using C#, but .NET 6 is still in development, so the current release supports .NET 6 RC1. You can also use this product to create web, cloud, and mobile apps based on .NET Core 3.1 and newer.

And speaking of the future, developers interested in .NET MAUI will be able to create apps that run across Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS using this framework when it’s released in the first half of 2022. Support for .NET MAUI is very limited right now, Microsoft says, but Visual Studio 2022 for Mac will get support for MAUI projects including workload installation, templates, build/deploy/debug, and more in future previews.

You can download Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview 1 from the Microsoft website.

Tagged with .NET MAUI, Visual Studio 2022 for Mac