Calling all Windows Developers (ASP.NET, C#, Visual Studio, etc)

[macDonalds]

How is the early 2009 base 15" Macbook Pro for a Windows Developer? It maxes out (officially) to 4 GB. How functional is this machine to either boot camp or virtualize Windows?

Good choice for Win dev (and OS X for playing/surfing)?
Bad choice, stick with a Win machine?

What are your experiences/thoughts on this issue?

 

[fishkorp]

In Bootcamp you'll be fine, it'll be no different from any other Windows machine with similar specs. As for a VM, it really depends on the resources you assign to it. I've used VS 2008 in VMWare with 2GB RAM allocated to it and it's very usable. Actually, it runs better than the garbage Dell I use at the office, but that's because that machine is old For heavy Windows development I'd really suggest Bootcamp though.

It depends a lot on your needs too. Personallly, the C# stuff I do isn't very complex, so I do a majority of it in Mono. So I code, compile, and run in a native OS X application. It builds a DLL/EXE also so I can just drop it into Windows and it'll work. There are some libraries and stuff that don't work with Mono though. So for those I use a VM.

 

[Maxpilot]

I run Windows XP Pro in VMWare Fusion. I use Visual Studio 6.0 to build my Windows apps. Runs great with the standard default settings that I used when I installed VMWare Fusion which I think only allocates 512k for memory.

 

[playalistic]

Hey, I use Windows 7 in bootcamp and run VS2008 & SQL 2008 for a bunch of development mainly asp.net and some WPF. Runs absolutely fine as expected really.

Will echo what fishkorp said though regarding Mono/MonoDevelop. This is coming on in leaps lately so definitely worth having a go with.

 

[Demthios]

Yeah I would have to agree I've ran both Win7 and Vista in Vmware and have used VS2008 and Websphere for Java programming and it works just as well is on a normaly win machine. And then I got CS3 for the mac side. Works great!