How is your Mac set up for Windows development?

Question

I'm looking at buying a MacBook Pro to replace my tiring laptop. My day to day job is as a .NET web developer so I am looking to use VMware Fusion to run VS and SQL server etc.

As I've not run my dev environment in a VM before, I would like to know how others are setup. What apps to you have installed? In which environment? Where do you store your files? Within each environment, or some shared drive? Are there any gotchas? Or essentials I should know.

Many thanks

Matt

Answer 1

I personally use Parallels Desktop 5 for my Windows virtualization needs. Like Fusion, it's compatible with Boot Camp, so you can boot Windows directly on the metal if you need that performance boost (empirically, it does make a difference).

Both Parallels and Fusion offer the ability to access mounted volumes between the environments when both are running. Parallels can also be configured to use your Mac user directories as your Windows user directories, though I'm not sure if they remain accessible under Boot Camp since they would be stored on an HFS partition. You might do better to keep them separate and either transfer as needed or use a repository or sync tool to keep both environments up to date. It depends on how much you need to move files between the two.

Regarding the software setup, I pretty much have a stock install of VS 2008 and SQL Server 2008. No matter what anyone else says, you will notice a difference in CPU-intensive processes like compilation on the hardware you're using. That goes along with running under virtualization. On the metal, Windows 7 runs like butter.

Answer 2

I use VMware Fusion to give me both Windows and Linux (x86-64) VMs for cross-plaform development. It works very well - just make sure you have plenty of memory (4 GB or more, preferably). I'm sure Parallels is similar, but I opted for Fusion because at the time it was the only way to run x86-64 VMs (they both support 64-bit now).