Visual Studio for Mac Retirement Announcement (devblogs.microsoft.com)

Informed by ongoing user feedback and usage patterns for Visual Studio for Mac, we’re focusing our efforts on optimizing Visual Studio, accessible through Microsoft Dev Box on any operating system, and the C# Dev Kit for VS Code, which is accessible on any OS.

Maybe it’s me, but VS Code (and equivalents) seem disjointed to me. The beauty of Visual Studio was that it encapsulated everything and helped the developer do more quicker by handling all of the fiddly stuff. I did actually try to switch to VS Code at some point, but all of the tutorials and help articles I looked at started at the command line. I can do command line, but why would I want to?!?!

Honestly, it’s the first step I’ve seen from Microsoft in the opposite direction of “look how cross-platform we are!” It’s a little weird to trumpet that message (which I’ve been all for, by the way), yet discontinue the development path on said platforms. Even in the post, one of the alternative workflows was “just virtualize Windows!”

Sigh.