Memoirs of a Bystander: Visual Studio.NET development on OS X w/ Parallels

A reader writes "There is an interesting blog piece entitled Memoirs of a Bystander: Visual Studio.NET development on OS X w/ Parallels. The piece does a good job talking about development for different environments then the one that you are programming in. " And with the continued rise of more and more heterogeneous environments, this will become more and more common.

Comments

Another Crappy Blog Slashvertisement

[BeeBeard]

Please stop linking to crappy blogs written by people who think they're important enough to even have "memoirs" and who think they're being oh-so-clever-and-ironic when they juxtapose the terms "memoirs" and "bystander" in their post titles.

Re:Another Crappy Blog Slashvertisement

[Mr. Underbridge]

Not to mention which, that title makes exactly 0 sense. So he nails the "pompous" and "incomprehensible" exacta.

Re:Another Crappy Blog Slashvertisement

[jhembruff]

I think its time to bring out the "selfrigheousidiot" tag!

Re:Another Crappy Blog Slashvertisement

[Otter]

Man, this guy is really taking a hammering here! In his defense:

• "Memoirs of a Bystander" is the (admittedly pretentious) blog name. The submitter misread the title bar.
• My understanding is that he's doing primarily Mac (or platform neutral) development, with a little .NET, not full-time .NET. If that's incorrect, I agree that what he's doing is silly and counterproductive.
• "Slashvertisement" seems unfair, and anyway it's a useful, well-written little piece that's completely distorted in the Slashdot blurb.

So I'd say this is just the usual case of submitter-illiterate-and-editor-barely-R'dTFA, unless the author is the submitter, in which case you sort of have a point.

Re:Another Crappy Blog Slashvertisement

[bunions]

I have to agree. I found the article interesting. Not sure why why the slashdot hive-mind has taken such an instant dislike to it.

Re:Another Crappy Blog Slashvertisement

[lerxstz]

I find that in general, the tone of the first post tends to set the tone of a lot of the comments that follow. If the first post tends to dislike the article, it tends to bring out the people who just like to complain about almost everything. Like you said, "hive-mind" sums it up pretty accurately.

DON'T RTFA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me summarise TFA. I have a blog and a mac and I run XP on the mac and write in the blog.

ehum?

[Keruo]

Why virtualize .net development?
Just run monodevelop and do it natively on OS X

Re:ehum?

[TheGreek]

Why virtualize .net development?
Just run monodevelop and do it natively on OS X

Probably because:

1) Monodevelop is a pile of shit right now.
2) Running said pile of shit inside X11 isn't a "solution."

Do you actually develop .NET and own a Macintosh?

Re:ehum?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you actually develop .NET and own a Macintosh?

Other than this idiot with his blog. Who would really want to?

Re:ehum?

[0racle]

Because Mono doesn't support all of the .Net stuff? Because he likes Visual Studio? Because all the cool kids are? Because he wants to?

Re:ehum?

[TheGreek]

Other than this idiot with his blog. Who would really want to?

I prefer Mac OS X for most things, but I pay the bills with .NET. Only now with Parallels and/or Boot Camp do I not have to have multiple computers to accomplish both tasks.

Re:ehum?

[Tronster]

Thank you for the link. I hadn't heard of "Monodevelop". It looks promising. If they get to the point of making a native Mac installer, I will take it for a spin.

Regarding .NET development, if he's like me... it's not about targeting the .NET platform, but creating software to run on Windows that leverage .NET. I'm a developer on the MS platform, and a month ago just bought my first laptop, a 17" MacBook Pro. Right now I'm doing the same type of stuff as "Bystander" but hope in a few months I'll have found enough free time to be natively developing in XCode and Quartz Composer.

It will most likely be at least a year after that before I can make a pay check doing so though. ;)

Re:ehum?

[m0rph3us0]

Hahah I wasted an entire week trying to get monodevelop working on OS X on Intel. (It never worked). Then I realized It would be cheaper to just buy Parallels, WinXP, and VS.NET. I estimate in less than a month the stack had paid for itself. I target mono on Linux and have found that developing in VS.NET and replicating your project files in .build (for Nant/Linux) files is the best way to go. Eventually I ran monodevelop on Linux and realized that it is a total piece of crap. Wtf is the point of an IDE that doesn't support debugging.

Re:ehum?

[nazera]

I work for a company that rents lighting,sound,automation and ...well a shit load of other entertainment related stuff. All the lighting guys use Mac's, the audio guys are 80/20 in Macs favor and automation guys are 100% Windows...I'm talking development and/or what ever tools the vendors might have supplied. My point: As a developer I want and need as many options as I can get my hands on. This is the first post that showed me some options on the Mac side .. Having one box that allows me to work in and on all of our Lighting/Audio/Automation gear through one Ethernet port is not just great it is FUCKING GREAT (and about damn time).

Re:ehum?

[bunions]

> And this is different from visual .net 2005 how?

Are you serious? Visual Studio is right at the top, as far as IDEs go. It's got it's warts just like everything else (Why is the goddamn configuration dialog not resizeable?!? arrgh) but overall it's very well-polished.

Re:ehum?

[lowe0]

Me. I like OS X, but I keep finding ASP.Net jobs, and I like working with .Net.

Re:ehum?

[MORB]

Right at the top?
Heh. Just goes to show the culture of mediocrity that symbolize the Microsoft era of computer science.

Right after this post, when I click into the visual studio window and it takes 30 seconds of doing god knows what before I can do anything (and perhaps it will throw a complete, recursive update of the solution explorer, redrawing the damn thing after reinsterting each file), I'll keep in mind that it's "right at the top as far as IDEs go".

I guess you get what you pay for.
Oh wait no, you don't. This thing cost an arm and a leg.

Re:ehum?

[bunions]

> Just goes to show the culture of mediocrity that symbolize the Microsoft era of computer science.

You forgot to use a '$' instead of the 's' in microsoft. You might also want to look into replacing the 'c' with three 'k's.

If you're just one of those guys who hates IDEs, ok, fine, whatever. Otherwise, I'm interested in hearing what IDEs you feel are better than VS, which must surely be a very long list due to just how badly VS sucks, right?

Re:ehum?

[dantheman82]

This is something I've really wanted to look into. However, I'd be curious if someone could get a sort of benchmark comparison of VS .NET 2003 development environment in a)Boot Camp b)Crossover Mac or c) Parallels

What is the trade-off on speed/functionality with virtualization/WINE-based?

Re:ehum?

[bcat24]

I couldn't disagree more. The Visual Studio 2005 IDE is the best one on the market, IMO. I've never had a problem with it freezing up, or anything like that. It can be a bit of a memory hog sometimes, but it's not too bad for an app of its size. Don't bash Microsoft for the sake of bashing Microsoft. Sometimes, very rarely, they put together a really nice piece of software. The VS IDE is one of the greatest.

Re:ehum?

[bunions]

> Which IDEs have you used on a day to day basis except visual?

Idea mostly, Eclipse for the oddball languages that no one writes an IDE for. I used KDevelop for a while, and Kylix a while back.

As for your assessment of VS, I think you're loopy, especially the comment about going downhill since 5 - that's just crazy. 5 was a complete crapfest. Even the hardcore linux nerds I know admit that VS7 is very good at what it does.

Re:ehum?

[MORB]

Don't bash Microsoft for the sake of bashing Microsoft.

Oh, sorry. I'll just keep that in mind next time it crap itself on me. I guess that all that frustration I get dealing with their crap all day long is just something I invented, too.

The VS IDE is one of the greatest.

You're clearly not picky.
Seriously, one day I'll have to capture a video of one of my working session with that thing. But then again, people like you will explain me that whatever happens is somehow my fault.

Re:ehum?

[MORB]

I didn't say "it been going downhill since 5", I said "it's going downhill".

7 was good for a lot of things, but you could already feel the performance starting going down the drain. Nothing critical yet, but there's clearly an architectural change that wasn't that good happening from 6 to 7.

Then comes 2005. As far as C++ is concerned, it brought basically two things: improving the data breakpoint stuff so that you don't have to bypass their context thingy that never seemes to work and just write "*(long*)0xADDR", and displaying the contents of stl containers.

Scalability-wise, it sucks. Have you ever used it with a solution containing several dozen of projects and thousand of files?
It might very well be the cause of most of the performance problems I experience. But then again, I'd expect an expensive, so called "top of the line" ide to be able to scale.

Re:ehum?

[bunions]

> 7 was good for a lot of things, but you could already feel the performance starting going down the drain. Nothing critical yet, but there's clearly an architectural change that wasn't that good happening from 6 to 7.

Well, yeah, 7 needs more CPU than 6. But they're separated by ... what? 5 years? And it does far more than 6 ever did. This is to be expected.

> Then comes 2005. As far as C++ is concerned, it brought basically two things: improving the data breakpoint stuff so that you don't have to bypass their context thingy that never seemes to work and just write "*(long*)0xADDR", and displaying the contents of stl containers.

Oh jeez. It brought so much more than that I don't even know where to start. Reasonable STL support would be a good start, I guess.

> Scalability-wise, it sucks. Have you ever used it with a solution containing several dozen of projects and thousand of files?

Yes. The last time I used VS7 was for with an sln with aroudn 20 projects and many thousands of files. By the time you have projects large enough to start choking VS, most of your other IDEs will have choked as well, unless they don't support the inspection necessary to support things like intellisense or refactorings.

Re:ehum?

[bunions]

> Seriously, one day I'll have to capture a video of one of my working session with that thing. But then again, people like you will explain me that whatever happens is somehow my fault.

Probably. Because I think I've seen VS7 crash maybe twice. And because all of my coworkers and pretty much everyone I talk to online, from total linux nerd to VB hackers, all agree that whatever MS's other failings, VS7 is pretty sweet. Given that, yeah, I would say that whatever problems VS7 is causing you are probably your fault - because no one else seems to be having these problems.

Re:ehum?

[MORB]

Well, yeah, 7 needs more CPU than 6. But they're separated by ... what? 5 years? And it does far more than 6 ever did. This is to be expected.

What does the number of years separating two versions have with the cpu consumption?
And what did 7 do that 6 didn't do that could justify using more CPU?

By the time you have projects large enough to start choking VS, most of your other IDEs will have choked as well, unless they don't support the inspection necessary to support things like intellisense or refactorings.

Where are the C++ refactorings? I must have missed them.
And intellisense doesn't work most of the time.

Oh, and I only actually work on a subset of these projects most of the time. I guess they haven't heard of the concept of lazy updates.
They seem to need some reading on the concept of multithreading, too. Eclipse does its indexing in a background task.
Visual decide to do it at any random time and becomes unavailable for a few minutes when it does it (sometime after I start using it again after leaving it idle for a while for a reson or another).

Re:ehum?

[killjoe]

I think VS2005 sucks donkey balls. Sure they finally added some refactoring support (why the fuck did it take them two years??) and a half decent build system but it still doesn't hold a candle to eclipse. Idea is even better. Netbeans beta is also vastly superior.

VS is being leapfrogged again. It will stay the worst of the big four for the next two years when MS will make an half hearted effort to integrate some of the features of eclipse.

Re:ehum?

[TheGreek]

What is the trade-off on speed/functionality with virtualization/WINE-based?

If you need raw performance and don't need to run Mac OS X applications at the same time, Boot Camp is your solution.

If you need acceptable performance and need to run Mac OS X applications at the same time, use Parallels.

If you're too fucking tight to buy a copy of Windows after having purchased VS2003 already, then Crossover might work for you, but I really wouldn't do any software development under it.

Re:ehum?

[bunions]

> Where are the C++ refactorings? I must have missed them.

Are there any IDEs that offer nontrivial c++ refactorings?

> And intellisense doesn't work most of the time.[...] Visual decide to do it at any random time and becomes unavailable for a few minutes when it does it

You're so far off from my experience and the experience of everyone I know that I don't know what to say. It's like you're talking about a completely different application.

Re:ehum?

[bunions]

> Idea is even better

I agree, but then Idea has the luxury of being Java-only. And it scales worse than VS does - truly large projects make it unusable. But I love me some Idea. Saves me probably an hour a day, every day.

Re:ehum?

[MORB]

> Are there any IDEs that offer nontrivial c++ refactorings?

Does visual even offer trivial refactorings?

And what's with using the excuse of what the concurrence does or doesn't do to justify that this expensive product doesn't do it anyway? That's what I was on about regarding mediocrity. And I should remind you that most other IDEs are free. Visual is not by any stretch, so why would they get off the hook because some free competitor doesn't do something either?

This "no one else does XXX, so why bother" mentality is not one that spawn good and innovative products. This is a mentality that spawns mediocre shit.

Re:ehum?

[dunkelfalke]

there are actually more c# ides. borland delphi 2006 for example, or sharpdevelop

Re:ehum?

[mr_tenor]

Hahah I wasted an entire week trying to get monodevelop working on OS X on Intel. (It never worked).

Great! Where are your bug reports?

Re:ehum?

[killjoe]

I would love it if they made IDEA work with ruby or python. They really need to support more languages. In the mean time there is always jpython and jruby.

Re:ehum?

[bunions]

They already make a refactoring plugin for VS C#, so I'm pullin' for a C# Idea.

Idea -is- actually a very good javascript editor tho, just fyi. Kind of overkill, but I'm used to the keybindings.

Re:ehum?

[IainCartwright]

Actually it is free - get a grip.

Re:ehum?

[MORB]

The version I'm talking about, the one I (and most of my co-workers) dislike is the professional edition, not the free one. You know, the one that the company I work for had to spend some big bucks on (given that we are around 20 C++ coders only on the project I'm part of, with two other projects in development in house).

This is getting hilarious. First, "B... b... b... but free ides don't do better", then "B... b... b... but there is a free version of visual studio for hobbyists, so it's free and therefore shouldn't be expected to be better than free IDEs, even the non-free version".

Re:ehum?

[Money for Nothin']

Not to mention:

3) Monodevelop isn't the defacto industry standard, Visual Studio is. So no business worth its weight in dog crap is going to consider using it, particularly when it costs a paltry (for business) $800/seat to buy a VS .NET Professional license, versus spending that much on developer time just getting the non-standard Monodevelop app running correctly, much less compiling compatible code they can ship as a professionally-produced product.

My guess is that the GP is still in college and has never set foot inside a corporation of any noteworthy size.

Re:ehum?

[killjoe]

Why bother with C# if you already have java? I mean that most sincerely. There is not that much difference between them. Why pick one over the other.

At least ruby and python give you other ways of working (monkey patching, multiple inheritance, mix-ins, continuations, etc.)

Re:ehum?

[bunions]

Delegates. Decent GUI performance. The ability to deploy apps without having my users jump through "do you have a supported JVM" hoops. And currently, the ability to read & write excel files without bringing in Third Party Tools Of Dubious Quality.

Re:ehum?

[Macka]

How do you know he didn't submit a bunch ?

Re:ehum?

[killjoe]

"Delegates."

YOu need them in C# and .NET not so much in java.

"Decent GUI performance. "

Both SWT and Swing have excellent performance on windows. Along with SWT you can also use wxwindows, fltk, fox, and even QT or GTK if you want. All native widgets, all with the same if not better performance then .NET.

"The ability to deploy apps without having my users jump through "do you have a supported JVM" hoops."

You will still need to deploy .NET 2.0 and soon 3.0 because most machines don't have 2.0 installed. Same difference. The JRE is smaller and does not require a reboot like .NET does.

"And currently, the ability to read & write excel files without bringing in Third Party Tools Of Dubious Quality."

You can use activex and COM. No worries there. If you wanted to use a pure java solution then there are excellent open source tools. I am sure they are less dubious then anything MS makes.

Re:ehum?

[SpinyManiac]

You might want to look at kb920805 or kb917452.

Re:ehum?

[JCMay]

It's been my experience (VS.NET 2003) that if Intellisense doesn't work, it's because you've got a syntax error in your code and the parser can't make sense of it.

Re:ehum?

[bunions]

> YOu need them in C# and .NET not so much in java.

No, I need delegates in Java. I am so goddamn tired of writing these goddamn verbose interface declarations then writing an implementation of the interface. Delegates/function pointers are so much easier.

> Both SWT and Swing have excellent performance on windows.

That's hilarious. SWT is ok, Swing is awful. The license for Qt is insanely expensive, GTK looks like ass. Dunno about the rest.

> You will still need to deploy .NET 2.0

not if you only target 1.1

> You can use activex and COM.

Through Java? I suppose you could. But why would you when you have a nicer, cleaner, easier language in which to do it?

> If you wanted to use a pure java solution then there are excellent open source tools.

There are? Find me these excellent open source java tools with which I may read and write excel 2k3 files. I've looked - all the tools I could find were either read-only or could only write older formats.

I've been writing in Java since '97. I like it just fine. But it's not the solution for everything.

Re:ehum?

[killjoe]

"That's hilarious. SWT is ok, Swing is awful. The license for Qt is insanely expensive, GTK looks like ass. Dunno about the rest."

What do you mean swing is aweful? Clearly you haven't used it in the past year. Look at the eclipse on swing project, it's a rewrite of eclipse using swing and it's just as fast as SWT. Swing has come a long way.

"not if you only target 1.1"

If you target java 1.4 or below you are pretty much guaranteed that all JVMs that came out in the last decade are compatible. Besides I just downloaded ifolders written in 1.1 and I had to download 1.1.xxx in order to make it work. There are incompatibilities in the point versions of .net.

"Through Java? I suppose you could. But why would you when you have a nicer, cleaner, easier language in which to do it?"

Yes you could. You still use java, you just instantiate activex objects, just like in VB or C#.

"There are? Find me these excellent open source java tools with which I may read and write excel 2k3 files. I've looked - all the tools I could find were either read-only or could only write older formats."

It may be that MS has changed the formats in order to prevent open source tools from reading and writing them. MS uses file formats as a weapon against competition both open source and proprietary. As I said you could always use COM because you are targeting windows only.

"I've been writing in Java since '97. I like it just fine. But it's not the solution for everything."

I never said it was. I was curious as to why somebody would choose C# and VS over java and eclipse/netbeans/idea when java does everything C# does and the IDEs are so much better then VS.

Re:ehum?

[bunions]

> What do you mean swing is aweful? Clearly you haven't used it in the past year.

If you're reaching down into Java2D to do complex rendering, which is what I'm doing, Swing performance was very poor. Now, maybe there's 1.5-specific techniques that will speed things up, but the code I wrote for 1.4.2 doesn't run significantly faster in 1.5.

> If you target java 1.4 or below you are pretty much guaranteed that all JVMs that came out in the last decade are compatible

Yeah, right. Every commercial java app I know of bundles it's own JRE for good reason. My last project would run in JDKs 1.3.[whatever the last version was], not run on any 1.4.0 JDK, about half of the 1.4.1 JDKs and any 1.4.2 due to some recurring weirdness in the XML parser.

> Yes you could. You still use java, you just instantiate activex objects, just like in VB or C#.

I'm only aware of 3rd party tools that facilitate this. Has something changed recently that lets you do it just using the JDK? That'd be kind of nice.

> As I said you could always use COM because you are targeting windows only.

I don't have to use COM with C# - not explicitly, anyway. I just have a nice Excel.Worksheet object. I'd rather not deal with the complexity of COM if I don't have to.

> I was curious as to why somebody would choose C# and VS over java and eclipse/netbeans/idea when java does everything C# does

And I've told you, at length. Delegates alone would have been enough to make me switch, especially when C# and Java are so close - it's easy to make the switch. The only thing is I keep capitalizing 'string' all the damn time.

> and the IDEs are so much better then VS.

Idea is better than VS, but not by a whole lot, especially if you get the Resharper plugin.

Re:ehum?

[AaronBrethorst]

Which configuration dialog? Do you mean Tools.Options? If so, I hate its lack of resizability too (and I own it, incidentally). I'm looking into making it a little bigger, but resizability probably won't happen any time soon :(

Re:ehum?

[AaronBrethorst]

Please do. I'd love to get the usability feedback you have on VS. Send any gripes you have to abreth [at] microsoft [dot] com.

Re:ehum?

[kv9]

pretty much everyone I talk to online, from total linux nerd to VB hackers, all agree that whatever MS's other failings, VS7 is pretty sweet.

that's probably the most wretched piece of blasphemy i've ever seen coming out of a slashdotter's (slashbot's? don't want to offend) greasy little fingers.

/goes to wash eyeballs

Um... huh?

[truthsearch]

The piece does a good job talking about development for different environments then the one that you are programming in.

No, he's developing .NET apps using Windows. His database is SQL Server. He doesn't want to use Mono. So he's almost definitely developing for Windows. Mac apps have far better native options for development.

The only tip someone might find useful in this blog post is his informal test of memory settings in Parallels.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy uses Visual Studio under an emulated or virtualized PC.

Whooo Big F'in Deal!

I guess it's special because he's on "a Mac" even though it's not really a trick because it's ALL PC HARDWARE ANYWAY.

I got lost in time

[OneSmartFellow]

I now work from home and I didn't have a company provided laptop anymore, so instead of upgrading an old desktop, I decided to splurge. The one hitch in my plan was the fact that I still did a fair amount of .NET development. Sure, there is Mono for OSX, but that's a far cry from Visual Studio.NET on Windows XP. Clearly, I would need a solution that allows me to run Windows XP on my MacBook Pro.

Too many tense changes in one paragraph. Somebody please teach this guy how to compose.

Re:I got lost in time

[shotgunsaint]

But, it's a blog! He doesn't have to be able to WRITE, that would be insane!

Re:I got lost in time

[Macthorpe]

Someone teach this guy that, let's be honest, his story of love, loss and VS.NET isn't actually that interesting to begin with.

Re:I got lost in time

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you learn how to read? The guy's usage is perfectly fine; it's not his fault that you don't know how to interpret standard English usage.

It does to me.

[Penguinisto]

As a guy who once worked in a VS.NET/X-Tools shop (the app had both a Win32 and a Mac version), it's kind of cool to see someone using both IDE's on one box w/o having to reboot to switch between 'em.

The fact that it works on Parallels fairly nicely means that you no longer need to buy two machines for the Mac guys (just make sure there's enough RAM in there), and that you can do porting in either direction w/o all the wasted time in transferring files...

/P

Re:It does to me.

[misleb]

As a guy who once worked in a VS.NET/X-Tools shop (the app had both a Win32 and a Mac version), it's kind of cool to see someone using both IDE's on one box w/o having to reboot to switch between 'em.

Running 2 IDEs isn't the challenge. Parallels has been out for a while and now there is VMWare Beta. I'd be surprised if you COULDN'T run VS.NET in virtualization.

I'd actually be interested in hearing how you managed to get a project to build in both XCode and VS.NET. I mean, just the lanaguage barrier alone would be a problem. I mean, you have Objective-C/Java for XCode and C++/C#/VB in VS.NET. Were they different code bases, or what? That is the kind of thing I wish this article talked about. Just running Parallels on a MacBook is uninteresting.

-matthew

Re:It does to me.

[Penguinisto]

Lots and lots of manual translation for the ugly parts - IIRC, the main File I/O portions were almost totally unrecognizeable between the two. I mostly worked on docs, SDK tuning and plugins, so most of what I did was drop-easy in translation. It also helped that we used Qt to handle nearly all the gruntwork in the UI, so almost everything in that portion was pretty translateable, with little to no need to porting effort.

BTW - you can use straight-up C/C++ w/ only a little setup in both IDE's (yes, Xcode too) - makes things a whole lot easier. :)

/P

Re:It does to me.

[mrchaotica]

I mean, just the lanaguage barrier alone would be a problem. I mean, you have Objective-C/Java for XCode and C++/C#/VB in VS.NET. Were they different code bases, or what?

C++ works everywhere (but I'd be very interested to hear what GUI toolkit he was using).

Also, by the way, aren't encapsulation and modularity two of the first things a CS student learns? It seems reasonable to me that he could have written the core of the program in cross-platform C++ and then have written two interfaces, one in Cocoa and one in .NET.

The other annoying thing about the situation would be managing the build process -- keeping the .xcodeproj and .sln files in sync would be a pain, IMHO. Did he just use make instead?

Re:It does to me.

[misleb]

BTW - you can use straight-up C/C++ w/ only a little setup in both IDE's (yes, Xcode too) - makes things a whole lot easier. :)

Ah, QT. So the app wasn't native Cocoa. Shame, really. Mind if I ask what app this was/is? Would I know it?

-matthew

Re:It does to me.

[misleb]

Also, by the way, aren't encapsulation and modularity two of the first things a CS student learns? It seems reasonable to me that he could have written the core of the program in cross-platform C++ and then have written two interfaces, one in Cocoa and one in .NET.

Sounds like they used QT. So it was all C++. As an OSX user though, i'd probably rather a program come with a native Objective-C/Interface Builder GUI and just use a common C++ core like you say. Although I don't know how well Objective-C interfaces with C++. I know Objective-C and plain ol' C mix well, but I'd be curious about C++.

-matthew

Re:It does to me.

[laffer1]

Apple added Objective C++ support to OS X years ago. There are some issues, but there are ways to integrate the code. Consult ADC for more information.

Re:It does to me.

[Penguinisto]

Sure - it's called DAZ|Studio; a 3d hobbyist's compositing and basic rendering tool. The base is free (as in beer), and the plugins are pretty cheap (quite a few of those are free as well).

HTH,

/P

Re:It does to me.

[aztracker1]

Yes, you can run Visual Studio .Net (2003 and 2005) in paralels and in vmware (with XP). As for cross-platform apps, using this tool, probably easiest to use MVC (Model, View, Controller) with .Net and winforms on windows, mono + gtk# in linux, and mono + cocoa# in mac. That's if you want to use VS.Net as a base for the windows side. It's not a bad development model, and mono is breaking a lot of ground in the various distros now.

Running Ubuntu 6.06 as my main desktop with vmware player setup for XP.

Re:It does to me.

[Brandybuck]

Both IDE's support C++. I'm doing crossplatform development with Qt/C++ on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and Unix. No problemo. I've had a few clients I had to rescue because they believed that Microsoft tripe that .NET was crossplatform.

Re:It does to me.

[evil_Tak]

Or you could use mono + gtk# on windows, mono + gtk# on gnu/linux, and mono + gtk# on mac.

Re:It does to me.

[misleb]

Yes, you can run Visual Studio .Net (2003 and 2005) in paralels and in vmware (with XP). As for cross-platform apps, using this tool, probably easiest to use MVC (Model, View, Controller) with .Net and winforms on windows, mono + gtk# in linux, and mono + cocoa# in mac. That's if you want to use VS.Net as a base for the windows side. It's not a bad development model, and mono is breaking a lot of ground in the various distros now.

I wish more developers would take a very modulular MVC approach when doing cross platform development. Unfortunately it is too tempting to just find some generic API like Qt that is cross platform. The problem with that is that you lose out of platform specific integrations and features.

-matthew

Re:It does to me.

[aztracker1]

Yeah if I wanted something that looked non-native on windows, and osx (both of which have far more market share than linux).

Re:It does to me.

[aztracker1]

Yeah, "Cross Platform .Net Development" is actually a good primer on this... the book isn't very in depth, but gives some good ideas to think about in general with cross platform dev... I'm partial to .Net myself...

Even simpler

[NineNine]

Why not get a PC for $25 at your local thrift store and use a $100 copy of Windows? I mean really, it's like going around your ass to get to your elbow. This is just dumb. If you're developing for Windows, you have to be a real masochist to try to do it on another platform, especially when you can use any ol' PC that you find laying around. It's not like a Windows PC is exotic or hard to find or expensive.

Re:Even simpler

[Cereal Box]

I don't know about using a $25 PC to do development work, but you're mostly right.

I mean, it sounds to me like this guy has to deal with Windows for at least eight hours of his day if that's what he uses to do development work. So why not get a development PC and use Remote Desktop (yes, a client exists for Mac)? The GUI is actually very responsive, and seeing as how he's complaining about Parallels refreshing the entire desktop every time a character is typed, I think using a PC via Remote Desktop will win performance-wise quite easily. And the upside is, he still gets to use his beloved Mac desktop.

Look, I understand the desire to use one's OS of choice. But if you're forced to use another OS for work, why not bite the bullet and build another PC to handle the task adequately instead of gritting your teeth and pretending to find the performance of emulation/virtualization to be acceptable? It's going to lose out to a second machine hosting the OS every time.

Re:Even simpler

[16K Ram Pack]

I would mostly agree with that. The only instance that I could see a benefit is that being able to run both on a laptop would give more flexibility if I was away from the main office.

Re:Even simpler

[NickFitz]

...seeing as how he's complaining about Parallels refreshing the entire desktop every time a character is typed, I think using a PC via Remote Desktop will win performance-wise quite easily.

Actually, I think that's something to do with Visual Studio. I've noticed exactly the same thing when using Visual Studio over Remote Desktop Connection via a VPN on an old slow machine (at my end): VS appears to redraw the entire contents of the editor window for every keystroke.

Also note that he only perceived that phenomenon when Quartz Debug was running: that's a Mac Developer Tools utility that intercepts every API call related to display rendering and logs it to a GUI. Naturally it slows things down considerably, but it's nothing to do with Parallels exhibiting a problem in performance.

I do my development on a MacBook and run Win XP Pro in Parallels. Occasionally I've used RDC to go onto my Windows laptop for some reason, but it's hardly ever neccessary. All the applications I run on Windows in Parallels run well enough that they might just as well be in a native Windows environment, including memory and processor intensive apps like Visual Studio. Not only is it not worth the money to get another PC, for a couple of months now it's not even been worth a few seconds of my time to turn my Windows laptop on.

Re:Even simpler

[Bluesman]

Because nobody at Starbucks is going to be impressed by a thrift-store PC. This guy has memoirs to write. You can't write memoirs on a cheap PC. Sheesh.

Re:Even simpler

[NineNine]

You're absolutely right. My fault.

Re:Even simpler

[wootest]

Also note that he only perceived that phenomenon when Quartz Debug was running: that's a Mac Developer Tools utility that intercepts every API call related to display rendering and logs it to a GUI. Naturally it slows things down considerably, but it's nothing to do with Parallels exhibiting a problem in performance.

Quartz Debug does slow things down, but he didn't use it to see how fast it was but *which parts of the screen are being redrawn*.

I'll have to agree with the solution. I thrive in Mac OS X and like Xcode and Cocoa, but I also think that Visual Studio 2005 is a very slick and very customizable IDE with well-implemented features as far as the coding itself goes, and the IntelliSense (code completion and semantics) features and performance is just a grand slam. For bread-and-butter reasons I need to do some C#+ASP.net occasionally, and VS2005 on Parallels fits the bill even on a meek lower-end MacBook (when hopped up on 2GB RAM).

Re:Even simpler

[Money for Nothin']

Actually, I think that's something to do with Visual Studio. I've noticed exactly the same thing when using Visual Studio over Remote Desktop Connection via a VPN on an old slow machine (at my end): VS appears to redraw the entire contents of the editor window for every keystroke.

I've noticed this too. In fact, with VS2k3, I had a problem where after several hours, text would start getting mangled in the graphical blitting in the text area. It was as though VS2k3 was using DirectDraw to render the textbox (or maybe the whole app), or at least some graphical control rather than the standard textbox... This bug required me to restart VS2k3.

Blessedly, I haven't seen this in VS2k5.

Point is though, if VS2k3/2k5 does use a Direct* control as I suspect, then I believe ("believe", because I've never done DirectDraw, DirectX, etc. coding, but I have seen this in Java's AWT classes) the behavior will be like that of a graphical paint area: the whole area is redrawn every time it is updated... Anyway, that's my theory. :-)

Re:Even simpler

[mollymoo]

This is just dumb. If you're developing for Windows, you have to be a real masochist to try to do it on another platform, especially when you can use any ol' PC that you find laying around.

He's not developing for Windows on another platform, for any useful definition of 'platform' (or for any useful definition of 'environment', as it was described in the summary). He's developing for Windows on ... Windows XP. Running on an x86 box. I'm really not sure what's supposed to be so newsworthy about someone running some apps in an OS which happens to be running in a VM. If he was developing for Windows in OS X (rather than in Windows in a VM in OS X) that might be interesting. But he's not. Visual Studio is just another application; that fact that it works in Windows when Windows happens to be running in a VM should come as no surprise to anyone.

Lame and pointless

[misleb]

A good job of talking about developing for different environments?? The guy ran Paralells. The article had almost nothing to do with developing anything. He just happened to be running VS.NET in virtualization. Big f'n deal. Lame and pointless.

-matthew

Re:Lame and pointless

[LWATCDR]

The point is that Virtualization is a current buzzword. If you want to hip and with it then you need to start thinking Web 2.0! Develop your app using AJAX under a virtualized environment!
Yea it is lame. If he was using QT, Java, or Mono to develop his application and set up Windows and Linux testing environments under parallels then it would be interesting.

Re:Lame and pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Very true. It is also very true that he's actually doing some productive work with that environment. The same cannot be said about a lot of the zealots around here. You know, the ones who think that "desktop environment" means "multiple console views with the oh-so-useful transparency". Or the ones who think "productive work" means compiling the same shit from source over and over again. Add extra points if they're doing it on hardware from the last millennium.

Those are the heroic stories you want to read about on slashdot.

Re:Does this article make sense to anybody ?

[torqer]

Not to me, as well.

Let's take it apart

Interesting blog peice... Oxymoron?

Entitled: Memoirs of a Bystander: Visual Studio.NET development on OS X w/ Parallels. Well, perhaps this is meaningful to someone who is a programmer. Pretty much incoherent to everyone else.

The piece does a good job talking about development for different environments then the one that you are programming in.

I think this would start to make sense if the THEN replaced a THAN.

And with the continued rise of more and more heterogeneous environments, this will become more and more common.

I would like to see more and more "more and more"s in one sentence. Four "more"s. Let's try this for brevity and clarity: As heterogeneous environments become more prevalent so will this phenomenon

MacBook & Parallels is a good combination...

[__aaclcg7560]

Right now, as I post this comment from my sexy black MacBook, I'm working from home using a Parallels VM with Windows 2000 (no activation issues) and all my job related applications. It's really nice as I wait for incoming help desk tickets to arrive while playing around with my typical Mac applications without having to reboot the system. As added job security, I'm considered to be a "Mac Guru (TM)" since I'm the only person who in my office who owns a Mac. Seriously, you can't go wrong with a Mac! :P

OSX memory usage

[Anonymous Coward]

Applications in OSX tend to grab memory and NOT release until the app is quit. It then takes the OS itself a while to purge the memory used by said application, although IME it appears that this can be forced by simply re-starting the app. e.g. from web browsers after running for the better part of the day, I can recover c. 100M+ of disk space plus whatever amount of physical RAM is released(haven't tracked this too closely)

Secondly OSX itself does NOT like to release physical memory at all. It appears to have a significant preference to growing virtual memory. e.g. After running a day or so, I can reboot a mac, run the same apps and see several 100M to 1G more of disk space now available v. merely quitting every app and not re-starting after the same period of time. i.e. it appears that the virtual memory pagefile is NEVER reduced in size until the machine is re-started. I have notied this behavior first with 10.4(skipped 10.3), and it never appeared to behave this way under 10.2. Caveat I am neither so tight on RAM or disk space that I have tried killing processes that control Dashboard, expose, etc. but those could be possible candidates for AFAIK newly exhibited behavior of 10.4. i.e. it is not significant enough of a problem for me to investigate it more closely, and secondly I am not employed by Apple so wrt that I gain very little from further profiling.

A summary

[jesuscyborg]

Here's a breakdown by paragraph FTFA:

• I too, decided to get trendy and buy a mac notebook. The catch is I really like the VS.NET IDE and don't want to use Mono. Therefore, I must run XP on my Mac on top of OS X
• No Virtual PC for Intel macs
• Now we have Parallels desktop instead. I am using it.
• I could have used Bootcamp, but I don't like to reboot...
• I have a smaller macbook, with lesser graphics power. I upgraded the ram to 2gb
• I like Paralells and use it everday. I essentially run all my programs in my virtual XP environment, like MS SQL server and even my Firefox web browser! But hey, I'm doing it on a mac!
• VB crashes sometimes, the rest of the apps just consumes memory.
• Caching could be improved
• Grapics rending speed is really slow. Notepad needs to refresh the whole screen when you type a character
• I would like to explain memory allocation
• I am a power user, therefore I dedicate half my ram to parallels. Oh! did I mention I actually use the following list of mac software???? Entourage (an MS product), Camino, iTunes, etc.
• My computer gets sluggish
• 512 megs of ram for parallel wasn't enough
• Why can't the virtual XP use OS X swapping instead of virtual virtual memory?

IANAW, but this is the worst article I've seen posted on /. in a while.

Re:A summary

[Paradise Pete]

IANAW

Walrus?

Re:A summary

[ConceptJunkie]

Weenie?

Re:A summary

[Dun Malg]

Why can't the virtual XP use OS X swapping instead of virtual virtual memory?

Did he actually ask this? Does he not understand how virtualization works?

Re:A summary

[g1zmo]

I am the walrus.

Re:A summary

[XoXus]

No, I'm Spar... err, Walrus!

Re:A summary

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the eggman. Googoogachoob.

Re:A summary

[tehcyder]

Weenie?

Weedy? Weaky?

Re:A summary

[ConceptJunkie]

Here's another clue for you all: The Walrus was Paul.

"No you're not", said Little Nikita.

You know, it's sad when I'm quoting from music that came out before most of us were born.

Re:A summary

[IntergalacticWalrus]

I am the walrus.

No, I am.

Re:Does this article make sense to anybody ?

[misleb]

Entitled: Memoirs of a Bystander: Visual Studio.NET development on OS X w/ Parallels. Well, perhaps this is meaningful to someone who is a programmer. Pretty much incoherent to everyone else.

Nope, no meaning to programmers either. Especially since the article had nothing to do with programming. The fact that he was running VS.NET was actually inconsequential. It could have been any demaning Windows applications that he just had to run on his Mac...

-matthew

OSX Memory Advertisement

[Anonymous Coward]

Applications in OSX tend to grab memory and NOT release until the app is quit. It then takes the OS itself a while to purge the memory used by said application, although IME it appears that this can be forced by simply re-starting the app. e.g. from web browsers after running for the better part of the day, I can recover c. 100M+ of disk space plus whatever amount of physical RAM is released(haven't tracked this too closely)

Secondly OSX itself does NOT like to release physical memory at all. It appears to have a significant preference to growing virtual memory. e.g. After running a day or so, I can reboot a mac, run the same apps and see several 100M to 1G more of disk space now available v. merely quitting every app and not re-starting after the same period of time. i.e. it appears that the virtual memory pagefile is NEVER reduced in size until the machine is re-started. I have notied this behavior first with 10.4(skipped 10.3), and it never appeared to behave this way under 10.2. Caveat I am neither so tight on RAM or disk space that I have tried killing processes that control Dashboard, expose, etc. but those could be possible candidates for AFAIK newly exhibited behavior of 10.4. i.e. it is not significant enough of a problem for me to investigate it more closely, and secondly I am not employed by Apple so wrt that I gain very little from further profiling.

Zzzzzzzz....The seamonkey has my money...zzzz...

[BeeBeard]

If even the breakdown is that drawn out and boring, then what chance do we have of even making it through the article?

I found the article very useful

[MoonFacedAssassin]

I'm going out on a limb here and stating that I like the article and found it very useful and informative. There are plenty of .NET developers in this world and I am one of them. I also love Mac OSX and it is great to see a semi-detailed and informative account of someone who set up the very environment I have been researching as a possible development platform. A large part of the applications the author uses on OSX and Windows is exactly what I would be using in the same setup.

It will be very beneficial to me when I finally get this platform set up to test the memory allocation in the manner the author describes, and assuming I don't take the plunge and get a Mac Pro, 2GB RAM will be the amount of RAM I choose for the Macbook Pro. After reading the article I can now purchase a new Mac and know that I can do everything I'm wanting.

Re:I found the article very useful

[Dun Malg]

I'm going out on a limb here and stating that I like the article and found it very useful and informative. There are plenty of .NET developers in this world and I am one of them. I also love Mac OSX and it is great to see a semi-detailed and informative account of someone who set up the very environment I have been researching as a possible development platform. A large part of the applications the author uses on OSX and Windows is exactly what I would be using in the same setup. It will be very beneficial to me when I finally get this platform set up to test the memory allocation in the manner the author describes, and assuming I don't take the plunge and get a Mac Pro, 2GB RAM will be the amount of RAM I choose for the Macbook Pro. After reading the article I can now purchase a new Mac and know that I can do everything I'm wanting.

You should write a blog, like the guy in the article. You managed to stretch "As a .NET developer who wants to develop within OSX, I am pleased to see how it can be done" into two long, boring paragraphs.

Re:I found the article very useful

[MoonFacedAssassin]

Not everyone is as perfect as you I suppose. I suppose Herman Melville should've just said "There's a captain after a whale, everyone dies except the narrator." for Moby Dick instead of writing the thousands of long, boring paragraphs. Now I'm no Herman Melville, of course, but it must be very rewarding to you to contradict and call anyone out who puts details into their posts. Seems you have something to say on many people's posts with your 4300+ comments and/or trolling. You deserve a medal.

"Rise"??!?

[Mr. No Skills]

And with the continued rise of more and more heterogeneous environments, this will become more and more common.

Wouldn't "resurrection" be more appropriate than "rise"? We used to keep way more OSes running at once than we do now.

Geee....

[Savage-Rabbit]

No, he's developing .NET apps using Windows. His database is SQL Server. He doesn't want to use Mono. So he's almost definitely developing for Windows. Mac apps have far better native options for development.

The only tip someone might find useful in this blog post is his informal test of memory settings in Parallels.

That's a bit harsh. I do the exact same thing as this guy does. I Prefer working with OS.X or failing that Linux as a Desktop OS to working with Windows and I sometimes develop for OS.X and Linux in my spare time using native tools. However at work I also have to use Windows for development purposes as well as for testing and for Windows only apps so I have solved the problem with Parallels and it suits me just fine for all sorts of reasons. For one thing I don't have to deal with the headache of having to juggle a Windows laptop for work as well as a the Mac because Parallels enables me to cram the whole lot, Windows, OS.X and all the devel tools onto my MacBook and a pint sized external drive for the Parallels image files I am not using at the moment. At home I have a more powerful development system built on the same concept but running VMWare for doing stuff my MBP and Parallels can't handle but unfortunately my employer is not that progressive and does everything via test systems managed by the IT department through an inflexible bureaucracy. Fortunately I am usually able to quickly set up a pre built Linux/Windows/Unix testing/development environment on my Mac and get a whole pile of work done in the time it takes the overworked guys in the IT department to find a machine and get a test environment up and running. Basically, thanks to Parallels, I can whip up a prebuilt instance of any operating system that runs on an Intel processor with in a matter of minutes without having to endure Windows as my primary Desktop OS and all this without ever rebooting anything other than a VM, which from my point of view is paradise. I'm not saying this is something every developer should do but this approach has it's advantages.

Re:Geee....

[truthsearch]

Oh, I use Parallels too. But I still see no value in the blog post. Plus the statement in the summary that this blog post gives insight to cross-platform development is just silly. He's developing inside a Windows environment to create Windows applications.

Re:Geee....

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:

Before we delve into Parallels, I wanted to mention an alternative to running another operating system on your MacBook: Apple's BootCamp. However, I have chosen to dismiss this as a viable option because it requires you to actually boot into the other operating system, and run it natively. Since the main reason that I bought a MacBook Pro was to run OSX again, this isn't really an attractive solution.

My MacBook is the lower end 15-inch, though there are no significant differences between both 15-inch MacBooks, other than increased storage, a minor speed bump and double the graphics memory. Since I am not into playing games, the graphics memory really didn't matter to me. I also upgraded to 2 GB of RAM, since I knew i would be using Parallels a lot, and if there's one truth about ALL virtual machines, it's that they LOVE memory.

After 2+ months of working with Parallels every day, I can honestly say that it's a pleasant working environment. Everything that I can do in OSX, I do. Everything else, I run in a Windows XP instance within Parallels. This includes:

* Visual Studio .NET 2005 & 2003
* SQL Server Enterprise
* ASP.NET & IIS
* Adept SQL Diff
* RedGate ANTS Profiler
* FireFox
* Other misc .NET utilities

That's not a minor list of apps. SQL Server runs two databases, one of which is several hundred MB's in size. With the exception of some stability problems that Visual Studio.NET 2005 has with regards to Visual Basic projects, I haven't experienced any crashes or lock ups, nor have I been upset with the speeds of Parallels.

Unless he wants to have one computer for each OS he will either have to dual boot the MacBook or Use Paralles. Now, I may be misunderstanding TFA quite colossally but what he seems to be saying there is that he chose to run OS.X on his Mac and on top of OS.X he runs an instance of WinXP in Parallels with that list of Apps installed and that he prefers that solution presumably because turning his OS.X workstation into to a Windows work station is as simple as selecting "Parallels->View->Fullscreen". Why dual boot when you can get decent performance out of Parallels and run both OS'es side by side?

Re:Geee....

[Money for Nothin']

Visual Studio on Windows in Parallels on OSX? You're living my dream! Where's your Kool-Aid, and do you mind if I take a swig? :-)

(Seriously, if I had the money, I'd get myself a MacBook and do the same thing. Alas, I will probably wait until my Toshiba finally dies...)

Mac Development

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, the article is really stupid, so allow me to raise a better point for discussion. What is a reasonable development environment for a Macintosh (that is to say, doing Cocoa development, not Visual Studio .Net!) Can you get by with a Macbook with 512MB? Is the hardware discount from the ADC worth the cost of a Select membership?

whats wrong with people.

[ahmetaa]

Java is first class citizen for Apple and it has - IntelliJ IDEA - Eclipse - Netbeans all of them are way ahead VS.net big time. what is this stupidity trying to emulate windows on a mac to develop .Net to and deploy on windows?

Re:whats wrong with people.

[Anonymous Coward]

"First Class Citizen", eh? Is that you, Steve Jobs?

Re:whats wrong with people.

[ahmetaa]

yes, and who are you ? a coward or a moron?

Re:whats wrong with people.

[bunions]

> Java is first class citizen for Apple

Sure it is. Unless you want to run 1.5 on 10.3, in which case you're SOL.

'first class citizen' my butt.

Re:whats wrong with people.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello!!! It says right on his name tag "Coward". Ask your doctor about adjusting the prescription for your glasses.

-- Another Coward

Re:whats wrong with people.

[ahmetaa]

Last time i check "Apple" was readying the Java 6. i don't remember seeing a .Net page in apple.com or a mention of a moron who run windows in apple to develop software.

Re:whats wrong with people.

[bunions]

> Last time i check "Apple" was readying the Java 6

Great. How does that help me with older java apps that require 1.4?

> i don't remember seeing a .Net page in apple.com or a mention of a moron who run windows in apple to develop software.

That is a complete nonsequiter. I was talking about Java, not .net.

Re:whats wrong with people.

[Octorian]

First of all, you can run Java 1.4 apps under Java 1.5 or 1.6.

Secondly, Apple does install Java in a way that can host multiple versions:

$ ls -l /usr/bin/java
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 77 Apr 24 2006 /usr/bin/java@ -> /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versio ns/CurrentJDK/Commands/java
$ cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versio ns
$ ls
1.3@ 1.4@ 1.5@ A/ CurrentJDK@
1.3.1/ 1.4.2/ 1.5.0/ Current@

Happy?

Re:whats wrong with people.

[bunions]

> Happy?

No, because my problem was that I need to run 1.5 apps on OS 10.3, not that I needed to run 1.4 apps under a 1.5 JVM.

Re:whats wrong with people.

[bunions]

Oh, I see. I said:

> Great. How does that help me with older java apps that require 1.4?

when I should have said

> Great. How does that help me run java 1.5 apps on OS 10.3?

Sorry, I seem to have gotten a little confused there.

Re:whats wrong with people.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not "trying to emulate windows on a mac"... This is Windows running (non-emulated) on a native Intel processor...

Try to keep up!

Re:whats wrong with people.

[Octorian]

Ahh, that is one annoying problem with Apple that you just have to get used to. As soon as they release MacOS 10.[x], they soon forget that 10.[x-1] even existed, and cease to care about supporting it. On the bright side, however, 10.4 finally stabilized a lot of the system interfaces. As such, 10.5 may not hurt 10.4 as much as 10.4 hurt 10.3.

Re:whats wrong with people.

[radarsat1]

> Happy?

No, because my problem was that I need to run 1.5 apps on OS 10.3, not that I needed to run 1.4 apps under a 1.5 JVM.

Write once! Run anywhere! Woohoo!!!

Re:whats wrong with people.

[Anonymous Coward]

We always call it write once, debug and rewrite everywhere.

Re:whats wrong with people.

[s122604]

Eclipse is "way" ahead of VS2005??? Put your hands up and step away from the crack pipe...

.Net on OSX Has Been Around for a while

[Anonymous Coward]

Mono works pretty well on OSX, there are still more glitches on it than the Linux version, but the team has done a great job. Most of the windows forms UI won't work, you pretty much need to build a different .Net UI for Windows/Mac/Linux. Take a look at imeem.com - their client looks great on Windows and Mac by using a platform specific UI built on a common backend. No doubt any linux version they do will have another UI built just for the penguin lovers out there.

Did I mention it will be on Amazon.com ?

[BeeBeard]

... he had a lot more to say than you.

Then perhaps you haven't heard of my soon-to-be-released autobiography, entitled Memoirs of a Slashdot Bystander: The Search for +5 Funny. Basically, it's 237 pages of filler that detail my computer hardware and software configurations, followed by another 82 pages that give interested readers insights into what I was doing between the ages of one and four. I am conservatively estimating that I will sell between 35 and 65 million copies, with a Michael Bay film based on my life (working title is "Transformers: The Movie") to follow in '07.

You know,

[Anonymous Coward]

that would take a lot more effort than ranting & raving on Slashdot. Maybe you should start by writing a blog. And maybe get it posted on Slashdot.

So I'm doing something similar on Ubuntu....

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu + VMWare Server + Windows2k3 Server running VS.NET 2k5 ... it works, but it's slow and annoying. easier just to run windows and deal with the crap as best I can. I tried, I really tried, but it's just not quite there yet.

Less then equal to...

[fitten]

The piece does a good job talking about development for different environments then the one that you are programming in.

So... talk about development for a bunch of programming environments then get specific about the one I'm programming in? How does he know which one I have?

Doesn't Parallels require Admin?

[Curt Cox]

Doesn't Parallels require administrator rights on Windows and root on Linux to use? If so, doesn't that restrict how easily you can use this solution on a arbitrary Windows machine?

I have been doing this for about a month.

[C. Alan]

My day job is as a Civil Engineer. However, I do a bit of programming on the side, mainly as a hobby.

About a month ago I went ahead and purchased a 20" Imac for use in my home. My wife uses it during the day for email and web browsing, and in the evening, I run Parallels with windows XP to use Autocad and Visual Basic .net Express during the evenings.

Typically, when I am runing Parallels, I don't have a lot of apps open in OSX, so my XP runs quite well with just 512mb of my 2gbs of memory allicated to it. I am still pretty much a newbie to OSX, and setting up Parallels was pretty easy even for me.

--C. Alan

Re:MacBook & Parallels is a good combination..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're the only one with a Mac, why do they give a shit about having a "guru?"

virtual pc

[minus_273]

ove been using virtual pc and win 2k like this on my g4 a while now. It works reasonably well.

Re:MacBook & Parallels is a good combination..

[__aaclcg7560]

Because the company develops software for the Mac but the entire infrastructure is PC-centric and all the Mac support is outsourced. So instead of telling the user to talk to the outside vendor (which frustrates Mac users to no end), I'll talk to them first to determine the best approach to the problem. Mac-centric customer service is a useful job skill.

Re:ehum? Xdevelop

[jbtule]

Why not use Xdevelop. I actually use(prefer) this for my windows .net development, and it works on Mac & Linux too. Not to mention it use the same project files as Visual Studio .net.

Huh

[SuperKendall]

I am conservatively estimating that I will sell between 35 and 65 million copies, with a Michael Bay film based on my life (working title is "Transformers: The Movie") to follow in '07.

I wouldn't have thought much of you just from looking at your user ID, but I guess you're more than meets the eye.

Missing some exposition

[SuperKendall]

Just when it got a little interesting, describing how he would up first trying 768MB of memory for the VM but ending up at 800MB, it lacked explanation as to why.

I currently have Parallels set to 768MB, I would have liked to see his reasoning for the tweak to 800MB.

Re:Missing some exposition

[robsoft]

I'd agree with that - I commented (in hindsight at too much length) in the blog and mentioned that I run with 768MB on a 2GB MBP. I too wondered what approach he'd taken to deciding 800MB was best.

Welcome to 7 years ago!

[Cthefuture]

I was doing this back in 1998/99 on the VMware beta. I ran Linux as my primary OS (for utility and security) but my job required me to develop mostly Windows software which I did using the regular Microsoft tools (Visual Studio) in VMware/Windows.

And I still do that to this day. 99% of the applications I develop are cross platform Linux/Mac/Windows and VMware lets me do most of that on the same machine. I do still have to use my PPC Mac some but eventually I'll either be running OSX in VMware or similar on an Intel Mac.

Re:Welcome to 7 years ago!

[dolphino]

Developing on .Net three to four years before it's release? Somebody mod parent up! He deserves his own submission!!!

Re:Welcome to 7 years ago!

[Cthefuture]

I didn't say .Net, I said Visual Studio which is what you would also use nowadays to do .Net smartass.

How Hard?

[flight_master]

I'm just wondering how hard it would be to create an OOP-level framwork to utilise each platform (Windows, *Nix, Mac) which looks and feels like it belongs on the platform (Winforms on Windows, QT, or GTK on *Nix, and cocoa on Mac) without porting at all. I know that .Net can do this on a language side of things, but I really wish we could implement GUIs the same was as we can console applications. Once we get to that point, as well as a standardized interface to deal with hardware, it would be MUCH easier to create multi-platform apps with little trouble.

Then is not the same as than

[Builder]

AAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!

eclipse would be better

[sentientbrendan]

As the above poster mentioned, monodevelop is actually nowhere near being usable for .NET development. This goes doubly so on a mac.

Personally, I don't really understand why the community is spending so much effort on putting together another IDE for linux, when several already exist and could be easily extended to work for mono development.

The most obvious environment would be eclipse, which is highly extensible. A well written plugin for eclipse would do wonders for the mono community. I suspect that the primary reason for wanting to write a IDE from scratch had more to do with wanting to have the development environment be done in .NET top to bottom, but at this point in the development of .NET that just isn't realistic. Right now we need a stable bootstrap solution that is better than makefiles.