Yes, that is right, this is Visual Studio 2008 running on my MacBook Pro within OS X. Today I ran across a blog that made mention of VMware Fusion. Until today if I wanted to develop in Visual Studio I had to use Boot Camp (Dual Boot) to boot into Windows XP and develop. Today I ran across VMwares website and downloaded a trial because I noticed that you are able to run your boot camp instance. This is pretty cool, because if I want to run windows natively I can boot into it, but if I just need to do something quick, I can run it within OS X. However, I opened a solution and built it and I didn’t notice any lag. It is really fast. Just to be fair, I also downloaded Parallels to compare. Parallels does pretty much the same thing and is also a pretty polished product. After compairing the two though, I decided to go with VMware Fusion and will probably by a license after my trial is up. It seems to have a cleaner, simpler interface that is easier to navigate and use. Both of these programs let you run windows within OS X in three different modes. You can do full screen, one screen, or a screen for each application. This is called Unity Mode in VMware and Parallels has a name for theirs as well. Unity Mode is how I am running Visual Studio in the image above. You can actually minimize these applications to the dock. VMWare actually has an icon on the dock that is pretty much the start menu in windows. If you have an Intel Mac, I highly suggest trying VMWare out for free for 30 days. You won’t be disappointed.
That is cool, I have been using Parallels for a while (Just XP - my macbook isn’t as beefy as yours :))
I haven’t tired VMWare on the Mac, but I like Parallels, and it works, I have VS2005, VS2008, SQL installed and it rocks. Good stuff
Steve
January 20th, 2008