According to the latest report, Microsoft today released Visual Studio 2022 for Mac 17.0 Preview 6. The latest version aims to solve the major problems in the Preview 5 version on January 25, while continuing to promote the IDE to native macOS UI transformation.
There are some improvements in this release, including fixes for known issues in Preview 5, such as unusable Android archives. 13 major crashes have been fixed, and top reporting feedback like SDK is not found in MSBuild.Sdk.Extras are also fixed in this release. Visual Studio 2022 for Mac now also supports .NET Core 3.1 development on M1 (arm64) devices and focuses on improving the quality of the core IDE shell, Git tools, Azure publishing, and Xamarin tools.
Microsoft has also finished migrating the IDE’s mainline functionality to the native macOS UI. In this release, the UI migrated to the native macOS UI includes the Extensions Manager, Change Signature Quick Action dialog, Git Stash dialog and Rebase dialog, as well as the Preferences screen – colors and fonts, keyboard shortcuts, debugger settings. Microsoft will also port the rest of the preference screen in the next preview.
Microsoft aims to focus on addressing top feedback, improving performance, and fixing crashes in the IDE for the rest of the 17.0 release and will work towards a generally usable release. Several IDE features, including regular expression editor, disassembly view, hex editor, task panel, convert/export solution dialog, policy dialog, and storing NuGet passwords for each project, will be available in version 17.1 Ported to native macOS UI.
Regarding the development of Xamarin and .NET MAUI, Microsoft has stated,
Once we complete support for Xamarin (via Visual Studio for Mac 2022 GA), we will shift our focus to creating an amazing experience for .NET MAUI developers. For now, the basic build/deploy/debug work is done, but We still need to bring in the tools you know and love from Xamarin – like XAML Hot Reload and Live Visual Tree. In addition to the existing Xamarin features, we’re crafting a new experience for .NET MAUI to highlight what it brings Amazing developer productivity improvements like multi-target single projects and .NET (C#) hot reloading. As the .NET MAUI conference nears the end of Q2 2022, we’ll be offering more on .NET in Visual Studio for Mac. NET MAUI support.
Many Xamarin features have been migrated to Visual Studio 2022 and the focus is now shifted to bug fixes and enhancing the Xamarin development experience.
Microsoft also recommends that Xamarin developers continue to use Visual Studio 2019 for Mac v8.10 to develop Xamarin applications instead of Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview 6 due to a number of known issues with the Xamarin experience.