{"id":232735,"date":"2021-05-19T13:01:03","date_gmt":"2021-05-19T20:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/?p=232735"},"modified":"2021-05-19T13:01:03","modified_gmt":"2021-05-19T20:01:03","slug":"developing-on-a-m1-mac-with-visual-studio-for-mac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/developing-on-a-m1-mac-with-visual-studio-for-mac\/","title":{"rendered":"Developing on a M1 Mac with Visual Studio for Mac"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi! We recently posted<\/a> about how Visual Studio for Mac is supporting Apple Silicon \/ M1 architecture through the Rosetta translation layer starting in version 8.9, and we’re working towards native support. We’ve been using and testing with M1 Macs, but it’s always great to hear how .NET and Visual Studio for Mac are working for our customers in the real world. We’ve invited Aaron LaBeau, an MVP and seasoned Mac developer, to share his experiences. Thanks, Aaron!<\/em><\/p>\n

We’re continuing to improve the M1 development experience in Visual Studio 8.10 Preview. Please try the preview<\/a> and let us know your experiences<\/a>!<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Apple\u2019s recent news<\/a> of switching processors from the Intel x86 family of processors to custom processors has caused a lot of talk among the development community. The M1 processor is a custom ARM 64-bit processor and is based on the popular A series processors that Apple has been designing and shipping in mobile devices for years. Apple is now shipping several models of computers all with M1 processors. I have been using an M1 Mac Mini since the launch of the M1 building software with .NET tools and my experience has been pretty good so far\u2026 for the most part<\/em>. When I tell developers \u201cHey I\u2019m running everything on a M1 Mac Mini,\u201d I get a lot of questions about support of various development tools used to build .NET applications and services that run in Azure.<\/p>\n

How does Visual Studio for Mac run on M1? First, keep in mind that I don\u2019t work for Microsoft or Apple, and I\u2019m just sharing my personal experience here. Visual Studio for Mac runs on M1 thanks to a translation layer called Rosetta 2 which translates x86 instructions to ARM64. It\u2019s designed to run without end users noticing it, and \u201cfor the most part\u201d it works like this. The performance feels the same as running on my 2019 MacBook Pro 16\u201d with a i9 Processor fully loaded with max RAM and storage, maybe even faster at times.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve seen me state \u201cfor the most part\u201d several times so far. With any massive change in technology there will be some hiccups. Large complex tools with many dependencies will take time to get ARM64 support fully working. I\u2019m not going to lie, there has been some small amount of pain when using a M1 Mac to develop software. Most of it is around things I\u2019ve had not work and then had to research fixes. I would like to share with you my experiences below.<\/p>\n

Web Developers<\/h2>\n

Out of the box Visual Studio for Mac runs great for ASP.NET development of APIs and Razor Webpages. I\u2019ve worked on multiple projects and a few Blazor apps and I\u2019ve been able to open them and debug without issues.<\/p>\n

\"Microsoft<\/p>\n

When you go to download Edge, select the \u201cMac with Apple chip\u201d version if you have M1 processor and you will get an optimized version of the browser.<\/p>\n

As you can see from my screenshot below, I have Microsoft Edge selected to use to debug with and I have the Blazing Pizza app debugging in Visual Studio for Mac without issues.<\/p>\n

\"Debugging<\/a><\/p>\n

For those web developers using other open-source software and tools, Homebrew now supports the M1 processor. You can find the download for Homebrew here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While homebrew does support the M1 processor, some tools will not install properly without changes to the way you install them. You can tell the command line which architecture to use when running commands. For example, until the Node.js v16.0.0 release (which included ARM support)<\/a>, I used the following syntax to tell Homebrew to install node with native M1 processor support:<\/p>\n

arch -arm64 brew install node<\/pre>\n
This would tell brew to install the arm version of node. If you wanted to support X86 and use the Rosetta 2 translation layer you could install it with:<\/p>\n
arch -x86_64 brew install node<\/pre>\n
Even running complex projects, like a project based on Jason Taylor\u2019s Clean Architecture .NET Core NuGet package are possible. For this, I simply followed the directions from the GitHub repo<\/a> and thanks to the awesome integrated Terminal support in Visual Studio for Mac I launched the Angular Web App which is node based right within the Terminal in Visual Studio for Mac. The terminal even supports all my custom fonts and colors I have setup in zsh. I don\u2019t know which developer worked on the terminal plugin, but they deserve a virtual high five for this because it\u2019s one of my favorite features in Visual Studio for Mac.<\/p>\n
\"Visual<\/p>\n
Also, did you know that you can open more than one Terminal window in Visual Studio for Mac? This is something I think most people look over and I love that I can have more than one tab open at a time. To open another Terminal tab just click the button on the right side of the window.<\/p>\n
\"Visual<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t express how much this has helped my workflow given I still use the command line for a lot of things like git.<\/p>\n
Mobile Developers<\/h2>\n
On the Xamarin front, life is pretty good unless you\u2019re using Android emulators. The good news is that .NET expert<\/a>, Podcast host<\/a>, and internet streamer<\/a> James Montemagno has a great article already up on how to work around this which you can read in his blog post<\/a> on how he setup his M1 Mac for Xamarin Development<\/p>\n
I would note I did a different work around to get my Android emulators working which involved the following:<\/p>\n