VMware Fusion: Cross Platform Developer's Delight
Sol Young has a great post on using VMware Fusion on a Mac to provide the best of all worlds for cross-platform development.
In this case, Sol's rig consists of a MacBook Pro with XCode installed, and VMware Fusion hosting both a primary development virtual machine with Visual Studio installed, and a handful of other Windows virtual machines (XP Home, XP Pro, Vista, etc. etc,) for doing regression testing of built apps.
Sol does a great job of doing a quick intro of how VMware Fusion can be used above and beyond just letting you run Windows on a Mac, but can even help turn your Mac into a serious development platform for Windows applications.
Sounds funny to the ear at first, but Sol, and lots of other users are doing just that, using VMware Fusion to take full advantage of their great Mac hardware, while using the power of virtualization to do things like snapshot and rollback to allow a clean base state for testing. Not to menion: finally getting Visual Studio for Mac!
Great post Sol!
Fantastic stuff....any possibility we'll see Workstation level snapshots in Fusion? (That's about the only thing that has considering Workstation on a Mac Pro vs. Fusion....I just can't see giving up multiple snapshots and clones from snapshots.)
Posted by: Andrew Miller | February 18, 2008 at 06:03 PM
I've tried this workflow (as it's one I would LOVE to use), but Visual Studio (both 2005 and 2008) seems incapable of reliably building projects that live in a Shared Folder (lots of bogus errors)... is there a trick to getting this to work?
Posted by: Steven Johnson | February 19, 2008 at 02:37 PM
Thanks posting this... In regards to the Shared Folder question and the bogus errors, I noted how to resolve it in the comments of http://solyoung.com/2008/02/17/the-macpc-devqa-environment/
Posted by: Sol | February 22, 2008 at 11:22 PM