Anyone realize success using Apple Mac OS 10.6 and Parallels 5 for a Visual Studio Dev machine?

Question

Greetings my wonderful StackOverflow family :)

I grew up using Windows and switched to OSX as a Computer Science major in College. I've recently started my first real software developer job, and have a ThinkPad and Windows XP for developing ASP.NET / MS SQL applications (Visual Studio 2008).

Question:

Basically, I am wondering if any developers out there have had real success creating ASP.NET applications on a Mac using a VM? I've been fighting with Parallels 5 all week and finally have Windows 7 and VS 2008 running but my hot-keys are all screwed up. Is it worth the work to keep beating this thing into submission? Should I give up? Should I give Mono a try instead?

Thanks Folks, I can't wait to see what you all think!

Answer 1

You could try VMware Fusion or use Bootcamp instead.

I havent used Parallels for a while - and that has a reason.

[edit] Parallels does support running a Windows on a Bootcamp Partition - as does VMWare Fusion.

Answer 2

I run Visual Studio on my MacBook Pro using VMWare and a Win 7 image. I havent had any issues. Havent tried ASP.NET development, but I assume its going to be fine since the IIS server or Cassini would be hosted on the VM.

The only issue I had was due to memory and maxing out my MacBook memory smoothed everything out.

Answer 3

I don't like the idea of doing development work on a VM.

1. Even if you manage to get it to work, little issues will crop up occasionally in the future.
2. Every time you encounter a difficult to resolve crash bug in your program, there will always be a nagging feeling that it's a VM-related bug.
3. You'll never get 100% performance in a VM.
4. You shouldn't need access to your Mac OS while doing work, and switching between the OSs is not that time consuming if you aren't constantly jumping back and forth between work and entertainment.

Just use bootcamp.

Note: I think Parallels supports running a VM fueled by a bootcamp-enabled windows, in a pinch.

Answer 4

I've been using Parallels versions 2/3/4/5 to do exactly this for some years now. @Brian - aside from problems arising from limited memory (I'd say 4GB minimum for this kind of thing) I've yet to encounter any issues. I develop .Net enterprise web apps using Visual Studio on a MacPro and also my 13" MBP) and can't imagine working on anything else in any other way :-)

Re: VMs vs Bootcam - using Bootcamp is an option if you absolutely have to squeeze the last 1-5% performance out of your box, but otherwise the benefit is minimal. Parallels will work with a bootcamp partition but has some drawbacks. For me the biggest pain was that Parallels VMs from a bootcamp part can't be suspended and resumed quickly and easily as ones running off an image file. Also, with image files you can keep a working clone of your VM ready to step in if your windows vm goes down. Its harder to keep a clone of a partition.

You can also give VM clones to colleagues so you're all working on identical environments. If your bootcamp partition goes down [and mine did many times during the Windows 7 beta days :-(] the road back to where you were is long and fraught. A lot of disk checking goes on and the bootloader is involved - can be nasty.

Just try it - you won't regret it. Its worth spending a bit of time setting up your keyboard. Personally I find this works very well with Windows 7: http://parkernet.com/applepro/ (its a mac->windows keyboard layout for Windows).

Hth.