While all of my machines are Macs, I actually really enjoy working in .NET. I thought it would be fun to try my hand at writing a Silverlight application. Unfortunately, as near as I can tell, Silverlight is not a part of Mono that actually works on OS X.
Is it possible to develop Silverlight on OS X, or will I need to use a VM? If it's possible, is Mono the only option, or is there some other way?
Have you heard of Moonlight?
Taken from the project page:
Moonlight is an open source implementation of Silverlight (http://silverlight.net), primarily for Linux and other Unix/X11 based operating systems. In September of 2007, Microsoft and Novell announced a technical collaboration that includes access to Microsoft's test suites for Silverlight and the distribution of a Media Pack for Linux users that will contain licensed media codecs for video and audio.
According to go-mono.com, you can use MonoDevelop to develop for Silverlight/Moonlight on Mac OS X.
Silverlight is comptatible for MAC OSX via a separate project, whose name I forget. Microsoft release the source code for silverlight to some people that are working on implementing on other platforms, including MAC
However, this means that it's always at least one version late, so MAC users can have access to silverlight 3, but not 4.
Old Mac that are not intel processors, only have access to silverlight 1.
Look at this page for a compatiblity list. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlight#Silverlight_4
I'd probably stick with a VM - I use VM's on my mac all the time, and Visual Studio is perfectly usable (obviously that does depend on your mac's spec)...
If you want it all for free, you can use VirtualBox, install windows on there (you can always use an evaluation if you don't own it), and then use Visual Studio Express - this SO question tells you how to set Visual Studio Express up for SL dev... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1365258/developing-silverlight-in-visual-studio-express
There was a Silverlight development tool that ran in Eclipse called Eclipse tools for Silverlight. It has a Mac version. It looks a bit stagnant though, so I don't know it's current status.
MonoDevelop does have moonlight projects built-in, so there shouldn't be any issue.
Also- while this prob doesn't fit your case, I bootcamped my MBP and while it's freaky running Win7 + vStudio on mac hardware, it works quite well.