Visual Studio on the Mac

What I love about Visual Studio 2008 is the great intellisense, formatting and debugging support across JavaScript, C#, CSS and XHTML. This love is enhanced by my bittersweet love of the .NET framework and is further enhanced by Microsoft's positioning in relation to jQuery (another passion of mine).

Visual Studio is great and has been so since about 2003. I've tried other tools (for JavaScript) like Aptana, Dreamweaver and Xcode; but have never been blown away. I must concede at this point that familiarity with Visual Studio and an almost addictive reliance on .NET have played there parts well, if only minor ones. I have tried to keep an open mind and have toyed with the idea of alternative server side technologies such as Java (probably WebObjects) or PHP, I just haven't reached a suitable jumping off point yet.

So here I am a .NET fan boy in denial, hopelessly drawn to Visual Studio, what's the big deal? All the features I've mentioned are available in the free version of Visual Studio, Visual Web Developer for the PC. And so enters my next big love, my iMac.

I am a Mac, and a PC...

I really love my iMac. My mac is beautiful to look at and OS X is a joy to use. It's not like I hate Windows, XP is great, and while a bit of an underachiever, I've not had any real problems with Vista. I'm also optimistic about Windows 7's place in the world. It is just that Apple as, in my opinion, the first computer manufacturer to place equal importance on design and function, create beautifully crafted machines that (mostly) just work. They are not pretentious, though a minority of people that use them are. My iMac is great, really great.

My dilemma then (as hinted toward in the title of this post) is how to bridge these two worlds. My solution came in one copy of Parallels 3, one copy of Windows XP OEM and an extra 2 GB of RAM. Parallels 3 (version 4 has just been released) is virtualisation software for OS X and has a great feature called Coherence. Coherence is the ability to run Windows applications as if they were native to OS X; this is done by hiding any signs of the virtualised operating system. Operating system functions like clipboard are mirrored to add to the illusion. I max'd out the RAM because Visual Studio was running like a dog with only 1 GB. Now I can quite happily run Photoshop on OS X alongside Visual Studio on XP with little or no degradation in performance.

I've not encountered any problems debugging web applications and I have the added bonus of being able to test browsers across multiple environments on one machine. I especially like the ability to launch Visual Studio directly from the OS X dock without touching XP.

And that's it. Visual Studio running on OS X.