macOS Programming using Visual Studio With VMWare

[guitarnoise]

I love my Mac, but want to write some programs using Visual Studio. I was thinking of getting a virtual machine such as VMWare Fusion to emulate the PC environment. I was wondering if anyone is doing any software development for Windows users on their Mac and what issues they have come across. Will I be able to write programs with Visual C#, etc on my Mac and then transport it to a Windows platform? Any thoughts on this is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[redwarrior]

I am running Parallels and it works great. No issues whatsoever. Pretty snappy too. I'm not a developer... yet, just doing school work right now. You will be working in a windows environment so it will be the exact same thing as working native.

VMWare will give you what you need. I think Parallels is a bit faster, but there are others here who disagree. Download the trial and give it a try. I think you'll more than likely be happy with either one.

Edit: I just remembered that I had an issue with the way Parallels named the files. I had to work around it. It was a little complicated. I remember reading that VMWare Fusion didn't have those issues. I recommend downloading Fusion, installing Windows and VS, writing some code and running it. Shouldn't take you long and will let you know what to expect.

 

[lee1210]

I think it may be worth noting that running VMWare fusion or parallels means you are running Windows, and running Visual Studio on top of that. The only thing that's running on your Mac/OS X is the virtualization program. Otherwise, VS will be running on Windows as if you were running Windows natively. As such, there shouldn't be much of a challenge running the resulting programs compared to a program developed on any other Windows installation, especially being that the CLR is even further abstracted from the hardware.

-Lee

 

[MorphingDragon]

I love my Mac, but want to write some programs using Visual Studio. I was thinking of getting a virtual machine such as VMWare Fusion to emulate the PC environment. I was wondering if anyone is doing any software development for Windows users on their Mac and what issues they have come across. Will I be able to write programs with Visual C#, etc on my Mac and then transport it to a Windows platform? Any thoughts on this is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I use VMWare and Unity with C# 2008, it seems fine for non-game/graphics development. Though I have it set on Quadcore and 4GB of RAM, anything lower is just too slow.

Another option is Mono, which it equivalent to .Net 2.0.*

VMWare is a more stable product than Parallels. Parallels however is faster.

 

[guitarnoise]

Thanks everyone! I am sure I can do this with no problem now!

 

[mdatwood]

I do my day job in a win7 VM using VS, MSSQL, and multiple RDP sessions. I have an i7 MBP and dedicate 2GB of ram to VM. It usable, but I'm planning on upgrading the machine to 8GB ram so I can run 4GB with the VM.

The nice thing about using VMs is that it's easy to make VMs dedicated to single purposes. My win7 VM is strictly for development work and VPN access to work. I have an older winxp VM that I use for VPN access to another client and it also has all the proper software versions for working with their systems.

In grad school one class project required linux kernel hacking. It's so much nicer to lock up a VM than it is your whole machine

Even if I had a windows machine I would still run VMs. They just offer so much flexibility.

 

[chrono1081]

I love my Mac, but want to write some programs using Visual Studio. I was thinking of getting a virtual machine such as VMWare Fusion to emulate the PC environment. I was wondering if anyone is doing any software development for Windows users on their Mac and what issues they have come across. Will I be able to write programs with Visual C#, etc on my Mac and then transport it to a Windows platform? Any thoughts on this is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I do this all the time since for class a lot of our programs need to be written using windows MFC or Direct X. It works flawless for me.

The only thing you may need to do is if you are doing heavy graphics work, you will need to boot into windows since a VM doesn't have full access to hardware acceleration. Unless you are making games however this shouldn't be an issue.