from the edge of the deep green sea

I decided to give C# a try and follow a series of lessons from an eBook to see how it turned out. The question that immediately arose was whether I should use BootCamp and run Visual Studio 2005 natively or use Parallels to run it under OS X using virtualization.

Using BootCamp would probably give me the best results performance-wise, but I would need to be in Windows the whole time (which I don’t mind at work, but I need OS X at home). On the other hand using Parallels would not be as fast as running it natively, but would give me the benefit of having OS X underneath and I would not need to restart my machine every time I needed to use Visual Studio.

I gave Parallels a try and I am quite impressed with the results.

Visual Studio is a resource hungry app – don’t get me wrong, it is not a memory hog. As a matter of fact, I believe it is one of the best IDEs out there. I am starting to really like the .Net languages and I would really hope xCode offered 1/16 of the functionality offered by Visual Studio and 1/32 the ease of programming of managed languages.

When I first launched VS I was a bit disappointed because of how long it took to run. Once things started caching, the performance improved quite a bit. After a while I was writing code, compiling, and debugging as if I was doing so on a native machine. There will be times when you will feel something slowing down (as when using the control palette for the first time), but I have to admit that it really is an enjoyable experience which I originally thought would be just downright painful.

I still have not tried this hack (I really don’t like installing the application enhancer) which might speed up things a bit more.

Here is a small video of how it behaves under OS 10.4.7, I have 1.5 GB of RAM and this is a 1.8 MBP (keep an eye on the CPU usage on the menubar).