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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.
Not to mention which, that title makes exactly 0 sense. So he nails the "pompous" and "incomprehensible" exacta.
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
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.
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.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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.