.NET Development on the Mac?

[tompatros]

Is anyone doing .NET development on the Mac? I don't know of any development environment that runs natively (like a Visual Studio .NET for the Mac).

I could use Dreamweaver for ASP.NET development, but I at least need a compiler - a dev environmentl would be ideal.

I'm looking at switching to a Mac as soon as the 15PB is updated (if ever...), and I would like to be able to do as much of my day-job programming on it.

 

[ewinemiller]

I don't think Mono is any place where you would do your day job with it and I'm not sure if there is an OSX port available anyways. Best solution would probably be get Virtual PC, install .NET. It's not screaming fast by any stretch of the imagination, but it's tolerable. I installed it a while back on a dual 800 to test, also in anticipation of the impending PB updates to see if I could ultimately get a portable platform that would support my Mac and PC development. .NET under Virtual PC seemed to work fine for building the C++ stuff I do, didn't try any of the web stuff.

 

[ewinemiller]

If you do go the Virtual PC route, there is one trick that might improve responsiveness, but I haven't tried it because I was using XP Home as the OS under Virtual PC. At the day job, we often work with VMWare to keep old development configurations around. We found that for some configs it was more responsive to connect the OS under VM using terminal services vs. going through the console in VMWare's window. If you install 2k server, or XP pro under Virtual PC, that might be worth trying for 5 minutes and see how it goes.

 

[Nermal]

There's a new open-source IDE for .NET but I can't remember what it's called! It only seems to be available for Windows at the moment, but since it's open source it should make it to the Mac.

Edit: It's called SharpDevelop.