andrewstellman
commented
9 months ago Thanks for asking! I actually do all of my writing on a MacBook Pro (running Windows in Parallels), so I've been really keen on making sure Mac uses have the best experience possible. I spent a lot of time working with the VS for Mac team at Microsoft when I was writing the 4th edition, and that was a really wonderful collaboration. One of my priorities for the 5th edition was to move all of the VS for Mac material into the main book chapters, and remove the Mac appendix entirely. And thanks to MAUI, I was able to achieve that and deliver the first draft back in November.
So you can imagine how we were thrown off by that end-of-life announcement for Visual Studio for Mac—that's actually the reason we had to delay the release of the 5th edition. Luckily, the experience with Visual Studio Code is good enough that you can do all of the projects in the book. I've been working for the last few months on replacing all of the VS for Mac content in the book with Visual Studio Code. There are a few things VSCode can't do (e.g. it doesn't have a "Paste class as JSON" feature), but it's definitely good enough for readers working on Macs to have a complete experience, and it will definitely still be in the main part of the book alongside Visual Studiol.
I'm hoping to have an updated draft done soon. I'm super excited about how well it's turning out!
So I love the update to MAUI projects and (if I understand it correctly) the end to the MacOS portion of the book being "separate but [not quite, let's face it!] equal" with Blazor vs WPF. However, Microsoft has announced the end of support for Visual Studio for MacOS effective August 2024, which is before the intended release of the fifth edition!
Is there a plan to support MacOS, given this development? The fourth edition of the book has become frustratingly outdated, and I would hate to see the fifth edition launch with the same problem right out of the gate!