Apple hardware is getting popular, even in the .NET world. Just a few weeks ago a colleague bought himself a new Mac Book Pro, one of our project managers started asking weird questions about our ‘experiences’ with Apple hardware and our CEO is secretly using an iPhone 3G since a few weeks ( most of us here remember him as ‘critical’ for the iPhone when it came out 
). I even had some official Microsoft SharePoint classes were the trainer was using a Mac Book Pro for his development.
Anyway, I was thinking that it might be a good idea to give a quick update on my .NET developing experiences on a Mac Book Pro. If you have read my previous post (back then it was on Blogger.com), I had some quirks.
My first impressions of visualization under Mac OS were not very positive. It worked but it was not workable. A few months later, after reading some positive reviews about the new VMware Fusion, I decided to try again. I downloaded the new 1.1.3 version of VMware Fusion. And whow… what a difference. They made major progress in speed and reaction time. The quirks I experienced in the previous 1.0 version were all gone. My biggest annoyance back then was that the intellisense and toolbox windows in Visual Studio were slow. They just didn’t pop-up or updated itself quickly enough to be workable.
After I completely configured the virtual image I did some tests. Booting up OS X and starting the virtual image with VMware Fusion was quicker than booting to Windows XP in Boot Camp.
So since 6 months I do all my .NET development under VMware fusion. I even removed boot camp from my Mac book , nice to have that drive space back.
Make sure you have enough memory. I have 4GB of RAM in my Mac book, 2GB are used for my virtual development environment . For now this is sufficient, I still use Windows XP as my development OS. If you use Vista you might want to add an other 512 Mb.
During the hollidays I ‘m planning to upgrade to VMware Fusion 2.0. It’s a free upgrade if you ever bought the 1.0 version!!! I will post my experiences as well.
