Have some questions for those who do .NET development on a MacBook Pro retina

[axi0m]

So I just got an MBPr and primarily develop in visual studio and will be spending most of my time in Windows.

Some questions that arise are:

What gives more battery life, running Windows 8 in bootcamp or in a VM like parallels 8 ? I would think Bootcamp would yield the better battery life unless Apple handicaps Windows with bad drivers on purpose.

Are there any particular services/process you would recommend turning off in Windows to preserve battery life ?

I am hearing Parallels 8 is now head and shoulders above Fusion 5 for virtualising Windows, especially when used with a retina MacBook, any truth to this ?

How well does the trackpad work with Windows 8, especially in metro/WinRT environment ? Are all the gestures supported ?

Do you think scaled mode or having Windows use the full retina resolution (hope I don't need a magnifier) is the way to go?

Are there any keys/combinations of them that replicate the behaviour of the missing end and home buttons ?

Is there any way to re-assign the control key in OSX to do what it does in Windows? That used for ctrl+c, ctrl+v, ctrl + a etc. As I am finding having to use the command button instead greatly uncomfortable.

Anything else I should know ?

 

[leman]

What gives more battery life, running Windows 8 in bootcamp or in a VM like parallels 8 ? I would think Bootcamp would yield the better battery life unless Apple handicaps Windows with bad drivers on purpose.

I can only answer this part - Bootcamp cannot run the integrated GPU, so the battery life will be significantly shorter. And its not really handicapping on purpose - the MacBook simply uses a hardware GPU multiplexer (instead of software solution like Nvidia Optimus), so you'd need a custom graphics driver for that, which Nvidia does not supply.

 

[vladster]

Your situation is not common, but I can share my statistics from similar situation.

I have MBP '13 2012 i5, with 4GB of ram, and suddenly needed to make some extensive change to really big project in Visual C++. I was given a dedicated HP Pavilion laptop with core 2 duo and 3GB of memory for that purpose, but switching between these laptops was inconvenient, so I installed WinXp virtual machine at my MacBook (using VirtualBox), downloaded Visual C++ Studio Express, and compared performance between the two.

With 2GB memory and all possible cpu resources (all processors at 100%) allocated to the Virtual WinXP, it was compiling the project slightly faster than the HP laptop.

I had to exit literally everything else to avoid swap file, but still it was more convenient than switching laptops, given, I also needed to develop something at the MacBook. 2 gigs was the max realistic memory amount I could give to the VM. If I was giving more, swap was slowing down the whole MAC OS X, that was running VM that was running WinXp that was running MS Visual C++ Studio Express.

Critical resource was the memory, as far as I remember, allocating more memory to VM affected compilation time more than CPU.

The project was over in several weeks, but if it would last, another option was to convert it to GNU C.

 

[axi0m]

Your situation is not common, but I can share my statistics from similar situation.

I have MBP '13 2012 i5, with 4GB of ram, and suddenly needed to make some extensive change to really big project in Visual C++. I was given a dedicated HP Pavilion laptop with core 2 duo and 3GB of memory for that purpose, but switching between these laptops was inconvenient, so I installed WinXp virtual machine at my MacBook (using VirtualBox), downloaded Visual C++ Studio Express, and compared performance between the two.

With 2GB memory and all possible cpu resources (all processors at 100%) allocated to the Virtual WinXP, it was compiling the project slightly faster than the HP laptop.

I had to exit literally everything else to avoid swap file, but still it was more convenient than switching laptops, given, I also needed to develop something at the MacBook. 2 gigs was the max realistic memory amount I could give to the VM. If I was giving more, swap was slowing down the whole MAC OS X, that was running VM that was running WinXp that was running MS Visual C++ Studio Express.

Critical resource was the memory, as far as I remember, allocating more memory to VM affected compilation time more than CPU.

The project was over in several weeks, but if it would last, another option was to convert it to GNU C.

Hmm, not really relevant to what I was asking but thanks anywhere I guess.
With the MBPr I have no shortage of memory to devote to VM's and I also suspect my situation is more common than you think, nearly every other dev has Windows/VS on their Mac so I am wanting to hear on their experience/optimisation tips.

 

[vladster]

my situation is more common than you think

Np. Then you should have plenty of responses here in no time.

 

[axi0m]

Np. Then you should have plenty of responses here in no time.

That or I should have asked this in a dev forum.