MacBook Pro - Dual Boot OS X and Windows 7 for .NET Development

Question

While this has been asked in a general sense on another thread or two, I'm looking specifically for feedback and experiences with MacBook Pro running Windows 7 under boot camp. I'm doing .NET 3.5 ASP.NET and WCF stuff and have the option to trade out my latitude D830 for a MBP. I've heard here and there that from people who dual boot their MBP with Windows that everything works fine, but I'm really more interested in negative experiences or gotchas to be aware of.

edit: I am also interested in positive feedback - My only request here is for feedback to be about dual boot as i will not be running my dev environment in a VM.

Answer 1

The only real issue is drivers, but these are provided on the Mac OS X install disc. Otherwise, it's fairly smooth sailing.

Some Macs (like the Mac mini) aren't fully compatible with 64-bit so you may want to check out Apple's website.

Answer 2

I know that you are more interested in negative feedback and gotchas, but I figured that I'd offer my experiences anyway. I've been running with a MacBook Pro as my primary development machine for the last year, and have had nothing but positive experiences.

I was pleasently surprised during my initial install when the boot camp drivers that came with Leopard supported Vista x64 out of the box beautifully, both in a dual boot configuration and under VMWare Fusion.

The Snow Leopard install disk has full driver support for Windows 7, and I've been happily running with Windows 7 x64 for the last 2 weeks without issue.

Answer 3

The people I know doing .Net development on Mac hardware all use Fusion - it's just so much better to have both OS's side by side. Bootcamp is really best used for games.