Visual Studio on a Mac [closed]

Question

My job is currently based on Visual Studio (ASP.NET).
Looking for experiences using Visual Studio on a Mac.
Does it work?

Answer 1

Like Stephen Doyle I use Parallels Desktop.

I'm currently running Parallels Desktop 4.0 on an old MackBook Pro with 2GB and its a bit slow.

In my last job I had a MacBook Pro with 4GB. I used Parallels Desktop 3.0 and ran VS2008 in a VM with 1.5GB memory. It worked well.

Answer 2

Lots of people are talking about Parallels and VMWare Fusion, but I didn't see any mention of the other methods I've used to good effect.

1. Visual Studio via Remote Desktop - I have a laptop running Windows/Visual Studio with a static IP and use the Microsoft Remote Desktop client to connect from my Mac. This has the advantage of minimal overhead on the Mac, so is more responsive than a VM. However, it has the obvious disadvantage of requiring a second machine running Windows and Visual Studio. If you're running Windows Server 2008, as a bonus you can run RemoteApp to share just Visual Studio to your mac - very convenient.

2. Virtual machine using VirtualBox - All the major features of a VM, except VirtualBox is free. I've used VMs with VMWare Fusion, Parallels and VirtualBox and I have to say I find performance to be pretty much even across all three. Parallels tended to drive my CPU harder than the other two but the actual VM responsiveness was fine. VirtualBox also has Seamless mode, essentially similar to Parallel's Coherence mode, but less integrated into the Desktop. I use this every day to run a Windows-only application on my Mac and it works great, sharing only the window for that application instead of running a full Windows desktop.

3. Boot Camp - depending on your needs, running Boot Camp with Windows installed as a dual-boot OS will of course offer the best performance but with the downside of running Windows ;)

Answer 3

I use Base Camp and I run Vista w/ VS 2008 on a MacBook Pro. I think it's the bees knees. Mac may make crappy dirty hippie software but they make some rockin hardware.

Answer 4

I'm using a 2.66 dual-core MacBook Pro 4gb RAM, VS2008 + XP in Parallels and I'm not having the best experience. Sadly, another hard drive is not an option and if I were to get an external hard drive, I'm not sure why I wouldn't just go back to a Windows laptop that doesn't need extra hardware. Others seem to have had a good experience with this set up though so I'm going to continue to tweak my settings. So far I'm kinda regretting having bought a Mac but not quite enough yet to take the financial hit of selling it on eBay.

Answer 5

I've run it in VMWare Fusion (and Parallels previously) on several Macs with 2 gig of RAM without any issues. I generally install with BootCamp because that lets you boot into "native" Windows if you need more "umph" (or if you want to game), and the more recent versions of VMWare and Parallels both allow booting the VM directly from the BootCamp partition.

Answer 6

In a word, yes.

I use a Mac Mini 1.67 GHz machine with 2GB of RAM. That's not an impressive box, but performance under WinXP is excellent. I have used VS2005, VS2008, MySQL Server, Sql Server Express, and dozens of little utilities.

The only issues I've ever had were when I used a hotkey (ex: F10) that was assigned to something like Expose in the mac. So I would hit F10 and instead of stepping over, it would bring up the weather widget. Workaround was to reassign those keys on the Mac (i.e., reassign to Shift+F10).

Edit:

I see others report having sluggish performance. You may want to get an extra drive and keep your Virtual Drive there. I've been doing that for a long time, and that may be the reason for good performance under XP. Jeff Atwood has a blog entry about this topic.