Entries tagged with ‘Parallels’:

Using a MacBook to run VisualStudio

Earlier in the year, I found myself in the middle of a great tragedy: the harddrive in my aging 12” powerbook decided it was time to say farewell. Now, I’m not certain, but I’m going to assume the main reason it left us, was to be with the superdrive which had also passed away about 8 months prior.

Clearly the only way to survive this whole affair was to sever all ties to the powerbook, and rebound with a new laptop. Clearly.

Since my primary development environment is VisualStudio.NET, I’d pretty much decided that my next computer would probably be a windows… Unfortunately, once I started shopping around, none of them met my small list of requirements:

• Small—I’m one of those people that thinks “the smaller the better”. The idea of lugging around a 17” monster is not for me.
• Runs VisualStudio.NET
• Has DVI Out—I’ve got that fancy widescreen 22” display at home. When I’m there, I want to be able to plug into it. (And, once you see the difference of DVI vs. VGA, you’ll never go back)

It seems that if you’re looking for a laptop from HP/Dell/IBM, you can’t get these things. Hardly any PC laptops have DVI out, and the ones that do tend to be those 17” beasts.

And then there’s the new Intel-based Macbooks. Core2Duo, DVI out, 13” widescreen… but could I really run VisualStudio.NET in parallels? I figured “what the hell”, and plopped down the money to see if it would work. One great thing about Apple machines is their high resale value. I figured, if I hated it, I could craigslist the damned thing, and get back most of the money.

So I ordered one of sexy black ones, with 2GB of RAM and a 160GB disk. It’s been a month now, and it’s going “OK”. The macbook is a lovely machine, but everything you read about fingerprints on the black are no exaggeration—the goddamned thing is a grease magnet. I’ve been using a microfiber polishing cloth to clean it, and I’m to the point of having to do it daily (damned OCD).

VisualStudio in parallels is also “just OK”. I’ve run into a number of weird issues with the Parallels Windows XP installer, where it appears to set permissions on the disk weirdly, and VS just can’t seem to cope with it.

I've also had a number of issues regarding disk corruption with the parallels disk image (not bootcamp)… maybe this is related to the above problem.

Parallels doesn’t like to sleep. If i just close the macbook while parallels is running, there's a 75% chance that the mac book won't make it into sleep mode, and also won't seem to wake back up. If I suspend Parallels before sleeping, it seems like there’s about a 40% chance that Windows will bluescreen on resume. I’ve finally learned to just shut Windows down all the time now, which is kind of a bummer.

Parallels is also just not as fast as I want it to be. When checking out the main Presto solution, there’s a number of web applications, web services, an instance of SQL Server, some device simulators, etc. that all need to be running. It’s do-able, but it feels like it’s running at the speed of my old 1.4Ghz windows desktop. Not awful, but after having everything in the Mac OS X go so fast, it’s a bit of a let down.

I’m finding that my natural work habits now are to run only VS in parallels, and run everything else (Mail, IM, browsers) in the mac OS… which I reckon is fine, though it's not quite what I expected.