Visual Studio on the Mac At its heart, Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio. If you enjoy the Visual Studio development experience, but need or want to use macOS, you should feel right at home. Visual Studio doesn’t run natively on OS X, so my first step was to get Windows running on my MacBook Pro. (If you want an editor that does run natively, Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio Code might fit the bill). Visual Studio doesn’t run natively on OS X, so my first step was to get Windows running on my MacBook Pro. (If you want an editor that does run natively, Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio.

I want to install Visual Studio on macOS. Is this possible?

7 Answers

Yes! You can use the new Visual Studio for Mac, which Microsoft launched in November.

Read about it here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/mt790182

Download a preview version here: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/

I recently purchased a MacBook Air (mid-2011 model) and was really happy to find that Apple officially supports Windows 7. If you purchase Windows 7 (I got DSP), you can use the Boot Camp assistant in OSX to designate part of your hard drive to Windows. Then you can install and run Windows 7 natively as if it were as Windows notebook.

I use Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7 on my MacBook Air (I kept OSX as well) and I could not be happier. Heck, the initial start-up of the program only takes 3 seconds thanks to the SSD.

As others have mentions, you can run it on OSX using Parallels, etc. but I prefer to run it natively.

I guess you can install it via Parallel or in any other Virtual machine with windows in it

No. Neither Visual Studio or the .NET framework will run on Mac OSX (although the latter is changing). However, if you want to write an application in a similar framework, you could use Mono and MonoDevelop.

There is no native version of Visual Studio for Mac OS X.

Almost all versions of Visual Studio have a Garbage rating on Wine's application database, so Wine isn't an option either, sadly.

While Parallels is technically a VM it is capable of running games in high resolution at a high frame rate. If you run Parallels in Coherence mode it completely integrates Windows 7 into OS X and .Net framework is fully supported. So yes you can install Visual Studio on your Mac however the Apps you created would only run of windows computers unless they were web based.

Yes, you can! There's a Visual Studio for macs and there's Visual Studio Code if you only need a text editor like Sublime Text.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged visual-studiomacos or ask your own question.

You can use this guide to uninstall each component in Visual Studio for Mac individually by navigating to the relevant section, or you can use the scripts provided in the Uninstall Script section to uninstall everything.

If you have previously had Xamarin Studio installed on your machine, you may also need to follow the instructions in Xamarin's uninstall guide, in addition to the following steps.

Note

This information will only remove Visual Studio 2019 or 2017 for Mac from your machine. to uninstall Visual Studio Code, see this issue for details.

Uninstall Script

There are two scripts that can be used to uninstall Visual Studio for Mac and all components for your machine:

The following sections provide information on downloading and using the scripts.

Visual Studio for Mac and Xamarin script

You can uninstall Visual Studio and Xamarin components in one go by using the uninstall script.

This uninstall script contains most of the commands that you will find in the article. There are three main omissions from the script and are not included due to possible external dependencies. To remove this, jump to the relevant section below and remove them manually:

To run the script, do the following steps:

1. Right-click on the script and select Save As to save the file on your Mac.

2. Open Terminal and change the working directory to where the script was downloaded:

3. Make the script executable and the run it with sudo:

4. Finally, delete the uninstall script and remove Visual Studio for Mac from the dock (if it's there).

.NET Core script

Visual Studio 2012 For Window 10

The uninstall script for .NET Core is located in the dotnet cli repo

To run the script, do the following steps:

1. Right-click on the script and select Save As to save the file on your Mac.

2. Open Terminal and change the working directory to where the script was downloaded:

3. Make the script executable and the run it with sudo:

4. Finally, delete the .NET Core uninstall script.

Uninstall Visual Studio for Mac

The first step in uninstalling Visual Studio from a Mac is to locate Visual Studio.app in the /Applications directory and drag it to the Trash Can. Alternatively, right-click and select Move to Trash as illustrated in the following image:

Deleting this app bundle removes Visual Studio for Mac, even though there may be other files related to Xamarin still on the file system.

To remove all traces of Visual Studio for Mac, run the following commands in Terminal:

You may also want to remove the following directory containing various Xamarin files and folders. However, before you do you should be aware that this directory contains the Android signing keys. For more information refer to the section Uninstalling Android SDK and Java SDK:

Uninstall Mono SDK (MDK)

Mono is an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework and is used by all Xamarin Products—Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, and Xamarin.Mac to allow development of these platforms in C#.

Warning

There are other applications outside of Visual Studio for Mac that also use Mono, such as Unity.Be sure that there are no other dependencies on Mono before uninstalling it.

To remove the Mono Framework from a machine, run the following commands in Terminal:

Uninstall Xamarin.Android

There are a number of items required for the installation and use of Xamarin.Android, such as the Android SDK and Java SDK.

Use the following commands to remove Xamarin.Android:

Uninstall Android SDK and Java SDK

The Android SDK is required for development of Android applications. To completely remove all parts of the Android SDK, locate the file at ~/Library/Developer/Xamarin/ and move it to Trash.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Mac Os X

Warning

You should be aware that Android signing keys that are generated by Visual Studio for Mac are located in ~/Library/Developer/Xamarin/Keystore. Make sure to back these up appropriately, or avoid removing this directory if you wish to keep your keystore.

The Java SDK (JDK) does not need to be uninstalled, as it is already pre-packaged as part of Mac OS X / macOS.

Uninstall Android AVD

Warning

There are other applications outside of Visual Studio for Mac that also use Android AVD and these additional android components, such as Android Studio.Removing this directory may cause projects to break in Android Studio.

To remove any Android AVDs and additional Android components use the following command:

To remove only the Android AVDs use the following command:

Uninstall Xamarin.iOS

Xamarin.iOS allows iOS application development using C# or F# with Visual Studio for Mac.

Use the following commands in Terminal to remove all Xamarin.iOS files from a file system:

Uninstall Xamarin.Mac

Xamarin.Mac can be removed from your machine using the following two commands to eradicate the product and license from your Mac respectively:

Uninstall Workbooks and Inspector

Starting with 1.2.2, Xamarin Workbooks & Inspector can be uninstalled from a terminal by running:

For older versions, you need to manually remove the following artifacts:

• Delete the Workbooks app at '/Applications/Xamarin Workbooks.app'
• Delete the Inspector app at 'Applications/Xamarin Inspector.app'
• Delete the add-ins: '~/Library/Application Support/XamarinStudio-6.0/LocalInstall/Addins/Xamarin.Interactive' and '~/Library/Application Support/XamarinStudio-6.0/LocalInstall/Addins/Xamarin.Inspector'
• Delete Inspector and supporting files here: /Library/Frameworks/Xamarin.Interactive.framework and /Library/Frameworks/Xamarin.Inspector.framework

Uninstall the Xamarin Profiler

Uninstall the Visual Studio Installer

Use the following commands to remove all traces of the Xamarin Universal Installer:

Uninstall Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Preview

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Preview was launched as a separate preview, allowing you to continue to work with your Visual Studio 2017 for Mac install side-by-side.

Now that Visual Studio 2019 for Mac has been released, you can now safely remove the Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Preview application.

To uninstall the preview application bundle, select Visual Studio (Preview) from your Applications folder and click Move to Trash, as depicted in the following image:

You can also remove the Preview plist file with the following command:

See also