Getting started developing with Sitecore CMS on a Mac using C#

Question

We are going to be switching to Sitecore for our CMS and my team uses Macs. We have no .net, c# experience but are excited to learn. I understand Microsoft recently released Visual Studio Code to work on Mac, and I've looked into Xamarin. Can someone provide any tips for a Mac guy?

Answer 1

Visual Studio for Mac will not help you because Sitecore quite tightly relates on windows features like IIS and windows filesystem with drives and paths; also the rest of cross-platform ASP.NET 5 features (like owin etc.) are not yet supported by Sitecore.

At the moment the best way to work with Sitecore on Mac is virtualisation and in particular - Parallels Desktop for Mac. I am using that myself for last 3 years - that is the most convenient way. Parallels Desktop is a virtual machine solution that integrates your Windows VM very tightly into Mac, you can run multiple (let's say 2-4) Windows virtual machines at the same time (nice to test Content Management / Content Delivery distributed between separate "machines" just on one Mac) - they are all connected to each other and Mac by a "network". Also you will need to have an instance of SQL server (in that case you may allocate a separate VM or simply reference an external SQL server).

Parallels Desktop has a mode called Coherence, when in fact win and mac environments are sort of merged into each other, so you can for example drag-drop from Finder into Windows Exploreк like you do it natively, and get Windows start button at you Dock and many other great features.

However I prefer to run Parallels in a full screen mode on a second monitor to be 1-to-1 like a regular Windows machine. By setting hosts file on Mac machine I can run CMS and hosted websites right from Safari on Mac.

Also virtual machines are stored as folders on your hard drive, so you can easily backup your current state of OS as easy as just archiving that folder, and later revert to that moments you have "saved" - very helpful to experiment, especially if you are a beginner in Sitecore, so you'd not afraid to break anything accidentally.

Good place to start: official website, as well as quickly investigate all its magic on YouTube reviews.

P.S. of course, you may use any alternative virtualisation software, like VmWare etc.

Answer 2

I use Visual Studio for Mac to build my Sitecore solutions. We use a gulp task based on the one that comes with Habitat to deploy changes to files (binaries, views, config, etc...) into a Windows virtual machine running in Parallels on my Mac.

There have only been two things I am missing from Visual Studio on Windows - debugging and Sitecore Rocks.

If you can live without those two things you can definitely develop your Sitecore solutions from a Mac with Sitecore running in Windows.