M1 (pro/max) parallels + visual studio

[alien3dx]

A week on a new machine. Well...

I feel it is a huge compromise at this point of time.

- Parallels + Windows ARM: still quite limited. Visual Studio is pretty slow. Not usable for serious work.
- Visual Studio Preview 4 native. Feeling like I got 2 fingers cut off. Performance is good, but every next important feature is "coming soon". Useless for now. Plus if you develop for windows servers, quite a lot of hassle to develop on Non-Windows platform for windows (paths, libraries etc). No, no, no.
- Remote Desktop: that's what i'm currently using now. It works really well, but I had to keep my old (well it is 6 months old) mac as my main machine which i'm remote desktopping from the new machine.

Is it worth it?

Don't know really. Except that i do not have to carry my laptop anymore (Intel sits permanently at the office, M1 - at home + Remote Desktop).

The good:

- Battery life is amazing (considering it is now just a terminal - no doubts it should be)
- Keyboard is amazing (yes, f&&k touch bar. Always hated it!)
- Screen is amazing. Blacks do make difference.
- Temperature/noise levels - huge win on the M1. Cool and silent. Nothing to add really.
- Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Video rendering is super fast.

The bad:

- Now i have to look after 2 laptops. One was meant to be sold, originally.
- M1 is heavy and ugly. Sorry Tim. It is.
- If i go on holidays and want to code (I often do so. I will have to carry my 2nd laptop with me). I really hope it will change soon and VS for Windows ARM will become as good as for x86 now. I don't believe VS for Mac will catch up any soon.
- 2nd copy of Parallels to buy as i still have hopes for Windows ARM.
- Lost Solidworks at home.

Check the latest video from Alex:

I think I mostly agree with him. This machine is not there yet for serious development. Intel MBP 16'' is still a winner for me.

holiday noo need code la. defrag your brain time.

 

[x600]

I may be misreading your setup, but it sounds like on the Intel Mac you are still running Windows under Parallels. If you instead install Windows ala Bootcamp, you will have better performance and only one OS to maintain and one less copy of Parallels to buy.

Also, why would you need to carry the 2nd laptop? You could remote into the main machine from anywhere, given a good Internet connection. I find even a cellular connection works for that.

The internet connection is something actually never works well when you are on holidays in Europe. But i thought that taking just the old laptop will be a better idea instead of taking 2 of them.

If i use windows via bootcamp, i'd rather have a PC then. For the total beauty is to use macos for everything else, but coding even when i'm at the office. I basically swipe between windows and macos using best of two worlds.

That's why i kinda regret i can't use a proper windows on a new machine.

 

[tomO2013]

Edited as I hadn’t realized that the OP had already discovered arm native preview 17 of visual studio 2022.

May I ask, what windows server issues specifically are you running into trouble with on preview 17 of visual studio??

 

[alien3dx]

Edited as I hadn’t realized that the OP had already discovered arm native preview 17 of visual studio 2022.

May I ask, what windows server issues specifically are you running into trouble with on preview 17 of visual studio??

What i saw diff vs mac and windows .
1. You cannot develop winform/wpf application. This is troublesome for old application winform which not related to .net core .
2. Hot reload not enable in vs mac 2022 but it enable on terminal .
** other specific might me unknown

 

[poorcody]

If i use windows via bootcamp, i'd rather have a PC then. For the total beauty is to use macos for everything else, but coding even when i'm at the office. I basically swipe between windows and macos using best of two worlds.

I guess I am just misunderstanding your situation then. I just meant instead of having to spend money on a new Windows machine, you could repurpose your Intel Mac for that.

I find with Remote Desktop, I use it much like I used Parallels: most of my work is in MacOS, and I just swipe over to the desktop client and do my Visual Studio stuff under Windows. Even resources like clipboard, folder, and printer sharing all work like Parallels.

 

[ADGrant]

What i saw diff vs mac and windows .
1. You cannot develop winform/wpf application. This is troublesome for old application winform which not related to .net core .
2. Hot reload not enable in vs mac 2022 but it enable on terminal .
** other specific might me unknown

You won't ever be able to develop WinForms or WPF apps directly on MacOS. MAUI is Microsofts cross platform GUI solution.

For .NET Core apps, my preferred environment is JetBrains Rider on MacOS.

 

[tomO2013]

What i saw diff vs mac and windows .
1. You cannot develop winform/wpf application. This is troublesome for old application winform which not related to .net core .
2. Hot reload not enable in vs mac 2022 but it enable on terminal .
** other specific might me unknown

Yes - lack of WinForms/WPF is an issue - if you have a much older legacy solution to be supported I could totally understand needing to stay on .net framework 4.8 on Wintel.
Even on Windows, I would keep an older version of Visual Studio handy if you need to support legacy 32bit WinForms. We started to migrate off of WinForms a while ago but still have one or two large 32bit winforms apps that need some TLC to uplift onto a more future proof platform. The apps build on for example VS 2016 or 2019 but not on VS 2022!

Sounds like you know all of this already But sharing this here anyway to hopefully be helpful to anybody stumbling across this thread who is interested in dabbling with the .NET platform on Mac.

On the .NET Core side of things, desktop UI and cross platform desktop UI, Microsoft has shifted focus to Maui https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui as a future state first-class SDK that is planned for gold release in Q2 2022 - they missed the .NET 6 deadline unfortunately.
If you were a Xamarin forms developer, even starting today on Xamarin forms, .NET 6 and Xamarin will provide a very simple upgrade path to Maui once it is fully baked (with minimal effort) in Q1-Q2 2022.
Personally I’m looking forward to this as it provides a lot of the maintainability benefits of a single solution project with multiple targets for iPhone, desktop Windows and Android. Even if I was a Windows only developer, with minimal Swift and XCode experience, this would excite me as a means for providing additional platform support!

On the topic of hot reload, this is targeted for a 2022 delivery on Visual Studio Mac, so it’s coming, just not there yet in the preview build 4. Supposedly you can enable this today for Blazor, Maui ], c++, via the terminal after installing the following nuget package and starting a new project. However I have not tried this yet to verify.
Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Razor.RuntimeCompilation

One caveat is that hot-reload and debugging only works on the Windows .NET Core platform, this looks to be a platform limitation at this juncture and not something specific to Visual Studio - it affects Linux and Mac platforms. If you want to debug, you cannot run your project with hot-reload. Only Windows .NET 6 platform supports debug and hot-reload.
As an aside even without hot-reload, my m1 Max , compiles and cold boots an aspnet app almost 400% faster than my i9 16” mbp. It’s extremely fast. I have not managed to get an answer of when debug + hot-reload will be coming to other versions of .NET 6 platform… but there is certainly demand for it from developers.

Finally, one last plug/shill also for Jetbrains rider - we moved to this a while ago for ASP.NET development on Rider, PyCharm and DataGrip. Jetbrains make my personal IDE of choice on Windows and Mac…. it’s fantastic. Get all the benefits of resharper integrated to the IDE. Best of all its’ been Apple Silicon friendly for a while now, so quite stable too!

What’s New in Rider 2024.2

Rider 2024.2 introduces full line code completion for multiple supported languages, reader mode with inline rendering of documentation comments, a new Tasks tab and task dependency graphs for debugging, as well as improved navigation to class members. Updates for game development include...

www.jetbrains.com

I hope that i could provide at least some help

 

[alien3dx]

seem a lot of here using rider also .

 

[jinnyman]

I've concluded long ago that if you need both Mac and Win worlds, it's best to have both machines hence my signature.
If what you do for living depends on a certain OS environment, buy what's native for that environment.
I didn't like dual booting as it hinders my work flow as I had to dual boot when needed. AS is much inhibitive than intel Mac.

 

[ADGrant]

I've concluded long ago that if you need both Mac and Win worlds, it's best to have both machines hence my signature.
If what you do for living depends on a certain OS environment, buy what's native for that environment.
I didn't like dual booting as it hinders my work flow as I had to dual boot when needed. AS is much inhibitive than intel Mac.

You certainly have a lot of machines. I just have a single Intel iMac (and an M1 iPad). For my day job I can just use the Citrix client on my Mac to connect to my Windows Workstation (12 cores, 64gb of RAM). Bootcamp can be a pain though it is much faster than using a VM. However, most of my use cases can be covered by running an Windows or Linux VM.

 

[Muk3sh]

Hi guys

a quick update from my side. The machine has arrived: Max 16" 32 cores, 64GB of ram.

I've installed the latest version of Parallels and the Windows 11 ARM version. Both VS2019 and MSSQL management studio I manage to run. VS2019 has a warning that it's not optimized for ARM but it runs.

I've successfully connected to a SQL standalone server and MS Azure database via studio no issues at all, didn't notice any speed lack.

Most important I successfully opened and run an ASP.net project .net framework 4.6 - everything is working. I will do later comparisons in terms of how fast was it. But what I noticed so far: no fun noise at all, the machine is cold- to a mild worm, no lagging between jumping from parallels to mac

stay tuned

I tried .net 4.6 project in Macbook Air M1 using Parallel Desktop and accessing MMSQL database through Azure Data Studio using Docker. It is working fine and I have create project and debugged it, everything works fine.

It has only 1 issue which I am not still able to solved was CSS, CSS and JS was not working when running project locally. If anyone know the solution please share!

Note: It is working fine in Windows PC