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Today, Microsoft announced .NET 6 Preview 1. It wasn’t a surprise, because they’ve been developing in the open for a long time as we saw in 2020, during the .NET 5 rollout. They’ve announced a new site, Themes of .NET, that anyone can visit to learn what others are thinking and what the priority and direction is for .NET.
What I’m most excited about are cross-platform UI and Apple Silicon (M1) support. The “Apple Silicon” they refer to is the new MacBook Pro with the new Apple M1 chip. I bought one recently and am currently doing 95% of my work on it. The only reason I’m not 100% is that I’ve left a few items on a Windows machine for unforeseen use cases that I might encounter. So far, so good, and the M1 is a very nice machine to work on.
In addition to M1 support, I’m interested in cross-platform UI features. This was something that wasn’t ready in the .NET 5 timeframe. They’ll do this via a project codenamed “Maui”, which is an evolution of the Xamarin Framework. In addition to Android and iOS apps, we’ll be able to build desktop UI for Mac, Linux, and Windows. From what I gather, they’re looking at WinUI 3 support too, which is the next generation of desktop UI that’s evolving under a separate, but coordinated, project.
So, I’m going to get brave and install .NET 6 Preview 1 with Visual Studio for Mac (VS). As I implied earlier, I have cloud backups, Git, and a Windows machine standing by if I get in trouble.
After opening VS, select Visual Studio | About Visual Studio to verify the version:
The announcement say’s 8.9, and this is a .1 version below that. To fix this, select Visual Studio | Check for Updates to see the Visual Studio Update window:
Select Preview, in the Update Channel, and observe that the proper version of Visual Studio for Mac 8.9.0.1593 appears. By the time you read this, the version might have incremented because the .NET team is doing fast releases.
Click Switch Channel and wait for updates to download. After everything downloads, the Close button will change to Restart and Install Updates, which you should click. After that, you’ll be ready to use VS…
