San Francisco, Sep 3 : Microsoft has announced the retirement of its Visual Studio for Mac and said that the support for the latest version, 17.6, will continue for another year, until August 31, 2024. "Visual Studio for Mac 17.6 will continue to be supported for another 12 months, until August 31, 2024, with servicing updates for security issues and updated platforms from Apple," Microsoft said in a blogpost. With this announcement, the company said that "we're redirecting our resources and focus to enhance Visual Studio and VS Code, optimising them for cross-platform development. No new framework, runtime, or language support will be added to Visual Studio for Mac". For the next 12 months, however, Microsoft will continue providing essential updates such as servicing updates for critical bug fixes, security issues, and updated platforms from Apple. In addition, it will continue to provide runtime and workload updates so users can continue building and shipping applications built on .NET 6, .NET 7, and the Mono frameworks. Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) used by developers to write and debug code for Windows applications. The product has evolved over time to support more programming languages and platforms. However, Microsoft claimed that the decision to discontinue Visual Studio for Mac should not be interpreted as a complete abandonment of the platform because there are alternatives in its portfolio. Other options for continuing to use Visual Studio on macOS include running the IDE in a virtual machine or launching a cloud-based instance. Last month, after iOS and Android, Microsoft announced to shut down its digital assistant Cortana app on Windows 11. While Cortana in Windows as a standalone app is deprecated, the support for Cortana in Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams display, and Microsoft Teams Rooms will end in the fall of 2023. /IANS