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Visual Studio for Mac Workloads

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Important

Visual Studio for Mac is scheduled for retirement on August 31, 2024 in accordance with Microsoft’s Modern Lifecycle Policy. While you can continue to work with Visual Studio for Mac, there are several other options for developers on Mac such as the preview version of the new C# Dev Kit extension for VS Code.

Learn more about support timelines and alternatives.

Visual Studio for Mac comes pre-installed with workloads for developing the following types of app:

  • Cross-platform mobile apps with .NET using Xamarin, for Android, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS
  • Mac desktop apps
  • .NET Core apps
  • ASP.NET Core Web apps
  • Cross-platform Unity games
  • .NET MAUI apps (Visual Studio 2022 for Mac 17.4 or greater)

Mobile applications with Xamarin

Xamarin allows you to create cross-platform mobile apps with .NET for Android, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Mac desktop apps.

For information on using Xamarin in Visual Studio for Mac, refer to the Xamarin Developer Center and check out the Mobile apps hands-on lab.

Mac desktop applications

You can build Mac apps with Xamarin.Mac using the Cocoa user interface framework, and Xamarin.Forms on Mac to build apps that share code and UI with other platforms.

.NET Core applications

For more information on using .NET Core, refer to the documentation.

ASP.NET Core Web Applications

For information on getting started using ASP.NET Core in Visual Studio for Mac, refer to the Getting Started with ASP.NET Core guide or check out the ASP.NET Core web apps hands-on lab.

Unity game development

To start building games with Unity, see the Setup page and the guide to using Unity Tools, or check out the Unity hands-on lab.

.NET MAUI applications

To start developing native, cross-platform .NET MAUI apps on macOS, install Visual Studio 2022 for Mac 17.4 or greater. For more information, see Get started with .NET MAUI.