Visual Studio for Mac Support

Check out the system requirements for current and previous versions of Visual Studio.

The Visual Studio for Mac Installer helps you install the tools, packages, and SDKs required by the workloads and components you select. To minimize incompatibility and ensure a smooth installation experience, we recommend going through this quick pre-flight check list to ensure that your computer is ready for Visual Studio for Mac.

• Apply the latest updates: refer to the system requirements here. Visual Studio for Mac requires a minimum of Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11. However, to create Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Mac or .NET Core applications, you must have macOS Sierra 10.12 or newer installed.
• Reboot before beginning the Visual Studio for Mac install: This ensures that any pending installs or updates don’t hinder the installation.
• If you plan to do mobile app development in .NET (with Xamarin), you should download and install Xcode in advance as this can take quite some time.

Currently, offline installation isn’t available for Visual Studio for Mac. If this is a feature you would like to use, please let us know on Developer Community. You can also monitor our roadmap for information on upcoming features.

The latest Preview build of Visual Studio for Mac can be downloaded and installed via the Preview channel in the IDE’s updater. For information on switching to the Preview channel, see the Updating Visual Studio for Mac article.

Installation logs for Visual Studio for Mac can be found in the following location:
~/Library/Logs/VisualStudioInstaller

No, Community edition is free to use for many scenarios. You can find out more about it here.

In case your Community edition installation prompts you for a license, you might have to sign in to activate the IDE. Follow the instructions here.

If you have purchased a Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise Subscription (Standard or Cloud), the license applies to Visual Studio for Mac as well. Standalone Licenses for Visual Studio Professional 2022 do not apply to Visual Studio for Mac. For more information, please refer to the subscription documentation.