Visual Studio for Mac 8.10 and .NET on Apple Silicon machines
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.
On Apple Silicon machines (also known as M1, M2, or ARM), Visual Studio for Mac 8.10 does not support the .NET 6 Arm64 SDK. .NET 5 and .NET Core 3.1 x64 SDKs are supported. .NET 6 x64 SDK is required for building projects since the .NET 5 x64 and .NET Core 3.1 x64 SDKs are not supported for building on Apple Silicon machines.
.NET 6 is not fully supported by Visual Studio for Mac 8.10 since C# 10 is not supported in the editor. For this reason the New Project dialog will not show .NET 6.0 as an option when creating new projects.
The latest Visual Studio for Mac 8.10 version will detect an unsupported .NET installation on checking for updates and will offer to remove it before installing the supported .NET SDKs.
Note
This information is specific for Visual Studio for Mac 2019 (8.10.x) versions. For information on this process for Visual Studio for Mac 2022 Preview versions, see Visual Studio for Mac 17.0 and .NET on Apple Silicon machines for details.