macOS I enjoy my macbook pro, but I'd be developing windows apps

pufftissue said:

Hi,

I like mac os x for my personal needs--email, photos, internet, general going against the grain desires; however, I'd be developing medical software that is primarily for the 1. web 2. windows machines.

If I'm going to one day earn a living developing software for windows machines, does a macbook pro, then, make sense?

What are my limitations by using a macbook pro alone?

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you could do bootcamp.

You can run Visual Studio in Parallels/VM Ware. Also if you have a MBP and want to make a Mac/Unix interface for the program you can do that easily too.

Keep the Macbook Pro, its the only platform that can run, OSX, Linux and Windows (Any flavour you want), sure you know this already.

When you think about it, it makes sense for developing having access to all of those platforms, there may not be a use to that thinking short term but one day something may come up.

Well I can't see many limitations, but I do can see some advantages.

If cost is not a factor the limitations would be having to reboot to get into boot camp to use your laptop under windows at full speed. Or Having to use VMWare/Parallels with a decrease on the performance of windows.

On the other hand one of the advantages I can see, is that if you are using VMWare (not so sure about parallels but I will assume they work the same). you can restart your windows partition with a different hardware profile, let say less ram, to have a feeling how your applications might run on the target machine.

Just my opinion.

Eraserhead said:

You can run Visual Studio in Parallels/VM Ware. Also if you have a MBP and want to make a Mac/Unix interface for the program you can do that easily too.

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If you have a large enough harddisk, it would also be possible to install several different versions of Windows simultaneously, which would be essential for compatibility testing.

Eraserhead said:

You can run Visual Studio in Parallels/VM Ware. Also if you have a MBP and want to make a Mac/Unix interface for the program you can do that easily too.

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I would add one caveat to that - make sure your machine has enough RAM.

I have a MacBook Pro and 'only' 2Gb RAM and I can assure you that this is not enough for running OS X and Windows as a development enironment (I need tools that are not provided for OS X, which includes databases and application servers).

I basically either use Windows (through Parallels) or OS X - allocating about 1.5Gb to Windows, which gives decent performance, slows down OS nearly to the point of un-usability.

I would strongly suggest you max out the RAM or use bootcamp.

From a price point of view, you might find that buying a reasonable PC (core 2 cpu + 2Gb or so RAM) will work out cheaper than maxing out the RAM (and also getting a lower spec Mac laptop) and more convenient than using bootcamp as you will have access to OS X all the time.

Obviously, if your Windows development requirements are more modest, then this might not apply.

i program for windows on my macbook using bootcamp, works great. seriously, windows XP has never run this fast. only a few things i needed:

launchy (open source quicksilver imitation): http://www.launchy.net/

applemou.exe for adding right-click capability when you don't have a 2 button mouse around:
http://www.geocities.com/pronto4u/applemouse.html

I run VS 2005 all the time under Parallels (on a MBP CD) and it works well.

Heh, I'm not sure what tools AlmostThere is using, but I allocate 768MB to the Windows virtual machine and it works fine. (I'm running XPSP2, VS 2005, SQL Server, usually the SQL management tool, browser windows, plus maybe Word or Excel, or a PDF viewer, etc.) Then again, I'll never tell anyone not to buy more RAM.

Rational Data Architect (and other Rational tools depending on task at hand), Visual Studio, WebSphere, DB2, XPSP2 + admin tools.

Writing this now from having to do a cold restart after the entire laptop stopped responding for 30 minutes after trying to change to read an email ... grrrrrr

[Edit] SQL Server and VS2005 seem to have a total recommended RAM of 768Mb - I really don't know how iSee gets them running sufficiently well for development at the same time, let alone along with Office

AlmostThere said:

Rational Data Architect, Visual Studio, WebSphere, DB2, XPSP2 + admin tools.

Writing this now from having to do a cold restart after the entire laptop stopped responding for 30 minutes after trying to change to read an email...

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Wow, that's crazy man, I have also been developing Windows apps under Parallels since the first beta of Parallels. I have Oracle, SQL Server, Visual Studio, 2 app servers under IIS, etc. and I have no issues like this. I'm running on a MacBook Pro first generation with 2GB RAM and an external SATA drive. One thing I've read several times is you don't really need to allocate that much memory to the VM, in fact that might start to kill OS X, I'd try lowering your VM memory and see if it responds better. I've even gone so far as to listen to iTunes, burn a DVD, surf the web, and use Parallels at the same time with no issues, OS X rocks!

EDIT: I just checked and currently I have on OS X; Firefox, Safari, Adobe Viewer, and Mail. In Parallels I have Word, Visio, Visual Studio 2003, SQL Query Analyzer, Oracle, SQL Server, cygwin (this is not a resource hog I suppose), and our own application running.

AlmostThere said:

[Edit] SQL Server and VS2005 seem to have a total recommended RAM of 768Mb - I really don't know how iSee gets them running sufficiently well for development at the same time, let alone along with Office

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Actually, now that I think about it, I generally have the Office apps and other miscellaneous apps running under the Mac OS directly, NOT the Parallels virtual machine, so they aren't using that 768MB. Sorry...

I have gone from ~768Mb to now 1.5Gb allocated to the VM. This has really been a compromise between OS X performance and Windows, hence my feelings towards choosing one or the other.

At 1 Gb, I generally had to turn off development IDE, deploy to the app server and then process data flow. This is principally for testing before releasing but is still far from ideal. The Rational tools I use most are Eclipse based, which I have found slower (without plenty of RAM).

BTW, I had to manually check the system requirements for the MS tools (hence the edit) - DB2 and WS both come in at a recommended Gb each, although, IIRC, these are production not development specs. I guess that is a testament to the efficiency of MS programming

Anyway, as they say, mileage varies. In retrospect, I would rather have a MacBook and a separate PC, I dual booted with Windows with Linux for several years but it never really worked out in terms of work flow.

To the OP, work out what your needs are under Windows and add that to (I would say) 1Gb to run OS X smoothly.

My life (Mail, Activity Monitor, Parallels running):

AlmostThere said:

BTW, I had to manually check the system requirements for the MS tools (hence the edit) - DB2 and WS both come in at a recommended Gb each, although, IIRC, these are production not development specs. I guess that is a testament to the efficiency of MS programming

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Actually it probably has to do with everything you are running is using Java. Java's a pretty big resource hog, it's almost like your running an operating system-within-an-operating system (within an operating system with parallels). All of the MS stuff is pretty much native, even .Net I think is a little more resource friendly than Java for the most part. I haven't done Java programming in awhile now, but I remember it eating up memory and threads and never releasing them. That was under Linux though, so maybe it behaves differently under Windows, but I doubt it.

crazyiez said:

you could do bootcamp.

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Bootcamp with Code Less and you'll be fine.

I make my living writing C#/.Net software on an iMac, so I don't see why a MBP wouldn't work just as well. My solution to date has been VS2005 on XP Pro under Parallels, but I'm currently giving VMware a try. Both do just fine given enough memory.