Much of my recent professional life has been dominated by the Microsoft development stack – Visual Studio, C#, SQL Server and related technologies, and in recent years, the popular JavaScript frameworks and libraries, Angular and React.
Developers who work with a similar technology stack, would often use a Windows machine as their primary development workstation, as I did. But, my preferred personal computing platform, has always been Mac OS and Mac hardware. So my employer’s or client’s workstations have almost always been powerful Intel-based Windows Workstations, but my personal machines have almost always been Macs.
When doing work at home on my Macs over the years, I’ve tried using various flavours of virtualisation on Mac OS, to run instances of Windows, on Mac hardware. I did this to run:
- Windows-based Dev Tools, such as Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code, or
- Windows-based Services, such as SQL Server, or Internet Information Services, both of which stretched the capabilities of a virtualised Windows environment extremely, or
- Other software or services for which there wasn’t a non-Windows option.
Initially, I used VMWare Fusion extensively, and more recently, particularly since Apple Silicon, Parallels. Both Fusion and Parallels are excellent products, but in recent times I’ve begun to re-consider the value of virtualisation of Windows on Mac for development activities.
Continue reading “Personal Virtualisation on Mac OS as a Developer? Probably Not.” →
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