Recommendations for ASP.Net development on a MacBook Pro

Question

I have a new MacBook Pro and want to get set up to do ASP.Net development on it. So what recommendations can the Stackoverflow community give me (and the others that I'm sure are out there)? Is VMWare Fusion better, or Parallels? Or scrap VM and run BootCamp? Inside the VM (or BootCamp), run XP, Vista, or one of the Server OSs? Any tips for things to disable that will make the environment run a little smoother? Or go another way entirely and use Mono/SharpDevelop?

Answer 1

I personally run VMWare Fusion 2.0 on my MacBook Pro and it is flawless with VS2005 and VS2008 inside a plain VM image (this lets me back up the image to external devices). I've used it to load a project with a huge amount of projects and it ran as it would on the metal. I do however have 4GB installed in the 'Book and allow the VM to access 2GB.

VMWare Fusion now works correctly when booting your BootCamp partition, so it is possible to create a BootCamp partition and then use VMWare to load it up as a VM inside OS X without the terrible re-activation problems. This would obviously let you install all your tools once, however when loading a bootcamp partition as a VM there can be a slight amount of disk thrashing. Fusion 2.0 now also supports DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 by default in XP and Vista.

I haven't tried Parallels but I have read plenty of opinion which suggest it is inferior to VMWare Fusion.

Also! make sure that you set the number of virtual CPUs and memory allocated to the VM before you begin any Vista install or you will trigger a product validation check...

Answer 2

I use VMWare Fusion 2.0 for it and wouldn't have it any other way.

I prefer VMWare of Parallels because VMWare supports multiple virtual CPU's (up to 4 now!) which is great if you've got VM's which are doing a lot of tasks.

I'll be running VS 2008, Outlook, several browsers, etc.

The reason I want VMWare over a native install is it gives me the ability to use Spaces (I run 6, so I have 12 virtual screens) and easily test against Safari and FF for Mac.

I'm running Vista x32 (only cuz we didnt have an x64 license at the time) and it runs just as well as my XP VM. Sure I don't have the flashy UI but I'm using it as a dev machine, don't care about the UI!

It'd be very easy to go on about VMWare and it's features, but with multiple virtual CPU's, snapshots and multiple screen support it is brilliant in my eyes.

Answer 3

I've tried VMWare, Parallels, and Xvm for virtualization on Mac. They all seem to have problems with various USB peripherals. As long as you don't need working USB in your VM, any of the above are fine. For us, we needed fully functional USB and had to use boot camp.

Answer 4

i guess the only option will be running windows natively or in a VM as ASP.NET development can be really painful with mono, apache & co.

Answer 5

I boot straight to Vista because I can't stand OS X, then I use VMWare 6.5 on Vista. Things will run much more smooth if you boot straight to the OS rather than going through a VM, but personally I like the portability of VMs more than maximum speed. I have heard great things about Fusion, some people claiming it is faster than VMWare on Vista.

What you should really consider investing in if you have many VMs is an ExpressCard eSata adapter. Then you can hook up a standard SATA drive to your MacBook Pro (or even a RAID array of them if you really need speed) and get a huge speed increase compared to external USB or FireWire drives (eSata max transfer speed is 3 gigabits / sec)

Answer 6

I used to have a MacBook Air and was using Parallels, it was HORRIBLE, I ran into memory issues all the time, and the VM instance would die off every so often as well.

I know others that are running BootCamp and having no issues.

I personally would prefer the BootCamp route, as it gives you the most resources available, and if you really need to get back to the Mac side you can quickly.

Answer 7

Currently I toggle between VMWare Fusion and Boot Camp to an actual installation of Windows XP, but I've used Mono before to great effect when doing standard application development. It definitely handles itself well, as I developed and submitted a Visual Basic .NET application for a university assignment with no complications, and the marker had no idea when I told them it was developed under OSX.

I know Mono supports ASP.NET, and have dabbled with it but not with any serious projects. Given my frustrations with VMWare and resetting into Boot Camp, I'd probably lean towards Mono if it is able to do what you need to do.

If you are going to use Boot Camp or VMWare, I'd go for Windows XP over Vista. I did, and especially with VMWare you want to keep resource usage to a minimum if you don't want it to drag along, and when I tried Vista in VMWare it really sucked. I'd lean towards using Boot Camp at the least, as it gets frustrating using Windows in VMWare because I run into issues with trying to use Windows shortcuts which get picked up by OSX first and never do what I wanted the keypress to do. I know there's a workaround for this, but I find it's easier to just reboot.

My recommendation: run Mono, at the very least try it out. Failing that, Boot Camp'ed XP.

Link to Mono