Visual Studio.net on a Mac?

  • Thread starter Thread starter VB Programmer
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VB Programmer

First, I apologize to Mac-haters... :)

I know that there are some software packages, like Parralel Desktop for Mac,
that let you run XP on a Mac.

Does anyone know if Visual Studio.net, IIS, etc... run good on a Mac, using
software like this?

Is anyone doing this? Is the performance good?

Thanks!
 
I use Microsoft Virtual Server to host my development environments.
These environments run in the background and I can use Remote Desktop
to access them in full screen mode. You can hardly tell you are in a
virtual environment.

One option you may want to consider is getting a low cost Dell desktop
and run MS Virtual Server on it and then use Remote Desktop from your
Mac to get into your development environment. You could get a Dell
system for about $400 which would be sufficient. Just get a large hard
drive (300gb+ and 16mb cache) and at least 2gb of memory.

To give each environment as much memory as possible I just run 1 at a
time and give it the memory the base install is not using. The great
thing about these virtual environments is that you can create a backup
of one of them once they freshly installed and revert back to the
backup whenever the VM starts to become unwieldly, like after trying a
few beta release packages.

That best part of this approach is that you do not fill up your hard
drive. I assume your Mac is a laptop. If that is the case you already
have limited space. You can easily get the 300gb drive for a desktop
for $100.

The dual boot option and the Parallels system are still possible, but I
think those are would be difficult to maintain.

I currently run a Dell Inspiron but hold my virtual machines on an
external drive enclosure which has one of those nice $100 hard drives
so I get the best performance out of my VMs without eating up all of my
internal hard drive space. And whenever I want to unplug and go I have
just 1 VM on the internal drive while my external has multiple
environments.

Brennan Stehling
http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
 
First, I apologize to Mac-haters... :)
Click to expand...

What a strange thing to say...
I know that there are some software packages, like Parralel Desktop for
Mac, that let you run XP on a Mac.
Click to expand...

If your Mac has a PowerPC processor as opposed to the newer Intel-based
Macs, you can use Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/virtualpc/virtualpc.aspx?pid=virtualpc

That will allow you to run any XP software, including Visual Studio.NET.
Obviously, your Mac will need plenty of RAM and hard disk space, just like a
PC would, to run resource-hungry Windows apps.

I have a PowerPC-based Mac Mini, and XP runs fine on it as a virtual
machine.
 
Great tips! Thanks.

Brennan Stehling said:
I use Microsoft Virtual Server to host my development environments.
These environments run in the background and I can use Remote Desktop
to access them in full screen mode. You can hardly tell you are in a
virtual environment.

One option you may want to consider is getting a low cost Dell desktop
and run MS Virtual Server on it and then use Remote Desktop from your
Mac to get into your development environment. You could get a Dell
system for about $400 which would be sufficient. Just get a large hard
drive (300gb+ and 16mb cache) and at least 2gb of memory.

To give each environment as much memory as possible I just run 1 at a
time and give it the memory the base install is not using. The great
thing about these virtual environments is that you can create a backup
of one of them once they freshly installed and revert back to the
backup whenever the VM starts to become unwieldly, like after trying a
few beta release packages.

That best part of this approach is that you do not fill up your hard
drive. I assume your Mac is a laptop. If that is the case you already
have limited space. You can easily get the 300gb drive for a desktop
for $100.

The dual boot option and the Parallels system are still possible, but I
think those are would be difficult to maintain.

I currently run a Dell Inspiron but hold my virtual machines on an
external drive enclosure which has one of those nice $100 hard drives
so I get the best performance out of my VMs without eating up all of my
internal hard drive space. And whenever I want to unplug and go I have
just 1 VM on the internal drive while my external has multiple
environments.

Brennan Stehling
http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
Click to expand...
 
Thanks Mark!

Mark Rae said:
What a strange thing to say...


If your Mac has a PowerPC processor as opposed to the newer Intel-based
Macs, you can use Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/virtualpc/virtualpc.aspx?pid=virtualpc

That will allow you to run any XP software, including Visual Studio.NET.
Obviously, your Mac will need plenty of RAM and hard disk space, just like
a PC would, to run resource-hungry Windows apps.

I have a PowerPC-based Mac Mini, and XP runs fine on it as a virtual
machine.
Click to expand...
 
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