i have to admit that i am fairly easily influenced. When I heard that
one of the Codebetter.com people had successfully run Visual Studio 2005 using parallels, and all the raving i've heard about Macintoshs from my coworkers, and the fact that to run Visual Studio 2003 on Vista would require a virtual machine anyway, I decided to take the plunge. I'd always been fascinated by the Mac OS X operating system, but it just didn't seem feasible until now.
$2800 later (thats WITH the student discount) i had a MacBook Pro. I'm typing this article on it now. I have to say that I'm even more impressed with it now. Many of the windows annoyances are gone. It runs a little slow when I'm running parallels, but not too terrible and i've heard things will be much smoother after another gig of RAM.
I opted to install windows 2003 server instead of XP. For one, i hate how XP will only allow you to create one website at a time. (To get around that in XP, you can install
IIS Admin) I also think it makes more sense for your development OS to be the same as your production OS. Every now and then, the jump from XP to Server 2003 or the different versions of IIS throws a curve ball.
The only thing that frustrated me was the networking. There are three networking options in parallels, and I couldn't see how to get Firefox on my Mac to browse IIS websites on my parallels virtual machine. It seemed like such a simple thing. Turns out I was over analyzing and I'll give you my findings:
You basically have three options:
Shared Networking - In this option, you're windows instance has network access, but its almost as if your mac machine is acting like the router. Your IP ends up like something like 10.211.55.x. Use IPCONFIG to find your IP and then you can simply browse to it using the IP address: http://10.211.55.x/ and hit your IIS sites. This is probably the option you want in most cases. As far as i can tell, other computers on your network CANNOT see your virtual machine, but your virtual machine can get out to the internet. Its probably more secure.
Host Only Networking - This works fairly identical to shared networking except that your virtual machine cannot get out to the internet at all. Your Mac can get to the virtual machine but thats it.
Bridged Networking - This option is really interesting. Basically, your Windows Virtual machine shows up as a separate computer on the network. Not only can your Mac get to (and it can get out to the internet) but other machines on your local machine can as well. This is useful if you want others to browse to your computer to see website, enable UNC, etc. In my case, my virtual machine's IP address shows up as 192.168.1.x. But obviously, its probably
In all these cases, you have to find your machine's private IP address in order to browse to it via your mac or other computers. Just use IPCONFIG or the properties on the network connection.
Visual Studio 2005, Tortoise and SQL Management Studio all seem to run pretty well. I've had a few times where VS.NET has crashed, but i'm not sure if thats related to my configuration of Windows 2003 Server, Parallels or both. I still haven't installed VS.NET 2003 yet. I'm hoping i can do without it and use
MSBee to compile my .NET 1.1 sites on 2.0. I'll let you know my findings.