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Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Finally Generally Available
Lagging by about six months, Visual Studio 2022 for Mac v17.0 has finally caught up to its Windows counterpart and reached General Availability (GA) status after a huge revamp of its frontend UI and backend runtime. That revamp involved switching from a hodgepodge of UI constructs to fully native macOS code, along with switching the backend to run on .NET 6 (instead of the Mono runtime), which also brings the new ability to run natively on ARM64 processors, known as Apple Silicon, Microsoft said in a May 23 announcement.
Release notes for v17.0 list six main highlights:
- New native macOS UI
- Support to run natively on M1/Apple Silicon (ARM64) processors
- Introducing the Git Changes window
- Tool window drag & drop docking
- Development with .NET 6
- Support for C# 10
All of the above and many more changes result in the fastest-ever "for Mac" IDE, able to do certain things, such as open a large solution, up to 50 percent faster than in Visual Studio 2019 for Mac.