How do I setup an ASP.Net/IIS dev enviroment on a Mac for my Flash developer?

Question

No, no, I'm not getting hives ;).

I am able to run a local version of my .NET 3.5 site on IIS and troubleshoot whilst I develop. However, my flash developer is forced to log onto our Windows 2003 and mess with our staging server when he wants to see how his work is doing. This is unacceptable, I understand, but right now there are time concerns so this hack is going to have to fly for a little.

How do I set up a dev environment for my flash developer to be able to work on his local machine? I'm sure this gets done in other places.

Answer 1

VMWare Fusion or Parallels, or give him a virtual machine/PC that he can Remote Desktop to from his Mac.

Answer 2

What kind of Mac is it? The Intel ones can run Windows natively.

Answer 3

Hi, well an alternative is the Q Emulator

Answer 4

Not to sound the fool, but isn't Flash not platform dependent? Is the flash developer doing anything more complex than connecting to a remote client to update an .swf file? You don't "need" to be running windows/iis to copy a file from mac to windows. You might try the Remote Desktop client:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/remote-desktop/default.mspx

or set up an FTP account (on the staging server in question?) for him. I agree with the above about using Parallels or VMWare. It's not necessarily a "hack" or "workaround" that you can use and test on multiple platforms. It's a huge plus! As a user of VMWare and ex-parallels user, I recommend VMWare. It takes about as long as "installing windows" to be up and running on a mac, and the resources from your Mac can be available via a "documents" on the desktop (or other) if you so choose.

Answer 5

Dual boot Windows on his Mac with Boot Camp?

Answer 6

What is the actual problem? As I see it, Flash dev. makes a Flash movie, and tests it locally, if it needs to communicate with the server, it does just that. If the Flash dev. wants to see it in a page, or see how it communicates with the surrounding HTML and Javascript, he uploads the file to the server using a ordinary windows share (aka Samba-share) or FTP or whathaveyou and then presto, it works.

Answer 7

Setup IIS in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine. Do a simplified install of Windows XP and it should run excellent.

That way you can interface with the IIS Server from Mac OS X or from other PC's from anywhere on the local network for that matter.

I use Vmware Fusion to run subversion and Apache servers and it runs beautifully.

Answer 8

I've just discovered http://www.virtualbox.org">VirtualBox which is a free alternative to Parallels and Bootcamp. I'm running Windows XP pro on my MacBook no problem at all - note it's for Intel Macs only though.