macOS Visual Studio on Mac

[meflynn32684]

Hey guys,

I currently have a boot camp partition running on my mbp so that I can use Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2005 under XP. I was really getting annoyed with having to reboot my machine every time I wanted to use Visual Studio, and so I purchased VMWare Fusion and I currently use Fusion to virtually run my Boot Camp Partition (with 2GB of ram this has worked very well thus far). Well I am now getting ready to start my first semester as a CS grad student at USC and so I want to do a fresh install of XP on my machine and I want to make the Windows partition a little bigger. My question is, who here is using Fusion (or Parallels) to do Visual Studio work? And are you using a Boot Camp Partition or just running a virtual machine? I know using the Boot Camp partition gives me the flexibility to boot natively into Windows if I want. Is there any upside to using a straight VM instead of the Boot Camp partition, besides the portability of the VM image? Is there any performance differences between the two modes?

Thanks!

 

[yeroen]

Well, with VMWare all you have to do is Ctl-Alt-Shift to return yourself to a proper OS and programming environment.

 

[ergdegdeg]

I'm using Visual Studio via Parallels and a virtual disk image. Right now, I'm thinking of using Boot Camp in the future so that I can also play some games. But I would never give up Parallels, it's just too comfortable.

 

[jeremy.king]

Is there any performance differences between the two modes?

Booting into Windows will yield the best performance. You will need all you can get for VS 2005 (2008 is worse!). Also, when I tried Fusion you couldn't suspend the VM that was using your bootcamp partition, so I still had to deal with the startup and shutdown of Windows.

 

[kkat69]

I have VS2k5 and VS2k8 on my Parallels virtual disk (no bootcamp disk, it in itself has it's own issues when using with either parallels or vmware) and for my development it runs just fine and dandy.

I do my web dev on it as well as windows mobile etc, even also doing some captaris workflow development as well.

I wouldn't recommend if your using it to create a game engine or psuedo os but for the average or above average development in .net a virtual disk image runs them just fine.