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

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.