Memoirs of a Bystander: Visual Studio.NET development on OS X w/ Parallels 147
A reader writes "There is an interesting blog piece entitled Memoirs of a Bystander: Visual Studio.NET development on OS X w/ Parallels. The piece does a good job talking about development for different environments then the one that you are programming in. " And with the continued rise of more and more heterogeneous environments, this will become more and more common.
Another Crappy Blog Slashvertisement (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Another Crappy Blog Slashvertisement (Score:4, Insightful)
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Did I mention it will be on Amazon.com ? (Score:5, Funny)
Then perhaps you haven't heard of my soon-to-be-released autobiography, entitled Memoirs of a Slashdot Bystander: The Search for +5 Funny. Basically, it's 237 pages of filler that detail my computer hardware and software configurations, followed by another 82 pages that give interested readers insights into what I was doing between the ages of one and four. I am conservatively estimating that I will sell between 35 and 65 million copies, with a Michael Bay film based on my life (working title is "Transformers: The Movie") to follow in '07.
Huh (Score:2)
I wouldn't have thought much of you just from looking at your user ID, but I guess you're more than meets the eye.
ehum? (Score:3, Informative)
Just run monodevelop [monodevelop.com] and do it natively on OS X
Re:ehum? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Monodevelop is a pile of shit right now.
2) Running said pile of shit inside X11 isn't a "solution."
Do you actually develop
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How do you know he didn't submit a bunch ?
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What is the trade-off on speed/functionality with virtualization/WINE-based?
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If you need raw performance and don't need to run Mac OS X applications at the same time, Boot Camp is your solution.
If you need acceptable performance and need to run Mac OS X applications at the same time, use Parallels.
If you're too fucking tight to buy a copy of Windows after having purchased VS2003 already, then Crossover might work for you, but I really wouldn't do any software development under it.
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3) Monodevelop isn't the defacto industry standard, Visual Studio is. So no business worth its weight in dog crap is going to consider using it, particularly when it costs a paltry (for business) $800/seat to buy a VS
My guess is that the GP is still in college and has nev
eclipse would be better (Score:2)
Personally, I don't really understand why the community is spending so much effort on putting together another IDE for linux, when several already exist and could be easily extended to work for mono development.
The most obvious environment would be eclipse, which is highly extensible. A well written plugin for eclipse would do wonders for the mono community. I suspect that the
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Are you serious? Visual Studio is right at the top, as far as IDEs go. It's got it's warts just like everything else (Why is the goddamn configuration dialog not resizeable?!? arrgh) but overall it's very well-polished.
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You forgot to use a '$' instead of the 's' in microsoft. You might also want to look into replacing the 'c' with three 'k's.
If you're just one of those guys who hates IDEs, ok, fine, whatever. Otherwise, I'm interested in hearing what IDEs you feel are better than VS, which must surely be a very long list due to just how badly VS sucks, right?
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Idea mostly, Eclipse for the oddball languages that no one writes an IDE for. I used KDevelop for a while, and Kylix a while back.
As for your assessment of VS, I think you're loopy, especially the comment about going downhill since 5 - that's just crazy. 5 was a complete crapfest. Even the hardcore linux nerds I know admit that VS7 is very good at what it does.
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7 was good for a lot of things, but you could already feel the performance starting going down the drain. Nothing critical yet, but there's clearly an architectural change that wasn't that good happening from 6 to 7.
Then comes 2005. As far as C++ is concerned, it brought basically two things: improving the data breakpoint stuff so that you don't have to bypass their context thingy that never seemes to work and just write "*(long*)0x
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Well, yeah, 7 needs more CPU than 6. But they're separated by
> Then comes 2005. As far as C++ is concerned, it brought basically two things: improving the data breakpoint stuff so that you don't have to b
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What does the number of years separating two versions have with the cpu consumption?
And what did 7 do that 6 didn't do that could justify using more CPU?
By the time you have projects large enough to start choking VS, most of your other IDEs will have choked as well, unless they don't support the inspection necessary to support things like intellisense or refactorings.
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Are there any IDEs that offer nontrivial c++ refactorings?
> And intellisense doesn't work most of the time.[...] Visual decide to do it at any random time and becomes unavailable for a few minutes when it does it
You're so far off from my experience and the experience of everyone I know that I don't know what to say. It's like you're talking about a completely different application.
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Does visual even offer trivial refactorings?
And what's with using the excuse of what the concurrence does or doesn't do to justify that this expensive product doesn't do it anyway? That's what I was on about regarding mediocrity. And I should remind you that most other IDEs are free. Visual is not by any stretch, so why would they get off the hook because some free competitor doesn't do something either?
This "no one else does XXX, so why bother"
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This is getting hilarious. First, "B... b... b... but free ides don't do better", then "B... b... b... but there is a free version of visual studio for hobbyists, so it's free and therefore
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VS is being leapfrogged again. It will stay the worst of the big four for the next two years when MS will make an half hearted effort to integrate some of the features of eclipse.
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I agree, but then Idea has the luxury of being Java-only. And it scales worse than VS does - truly large projects make it unusable. But I love me some Idea. Saves me probably an hour a day, every day.
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Idea -is- actually a very good javascript editor tho, just fyi. Kind of overkill, but I'm used to the keybindings.
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At least ruby and python give you other ways of working (monkey patching, multiple inheritance, mix-ins, continuations, etc.)
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YOu need them in C# and
"Decent GUI performance. "
Both SWT and Swing have excellent performance on windows. Along with SWT you can also use wxwindows, fltk, fox, and even QT or GTK if you want. All native widgets, all with the same if not better performance then
"The ability to deploy apps without having my users jump through "do you have a supported JVM" hoops."
You will still need to deploy
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No, I need delegates in Java. I am so goddamn tired of writing these goddamn verbose interface declarations then writing an implementation of the interface. Delegates/function pointers are so much easier.
> Both SWT and Swing have excellent performance on windows.
That's hilarious. SWT is ok, Swing is awful. The license for Qt is insanely expensive, GTK looks like ass. Dunno about the rest.
> You will still need to deploy
not if you only ta
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What do you mean swing is aweful? Clearly you haven't used it in the past year. Look at the eclipse on swing project, it's a rewrite of eclipse using swing and it's just as fast as SWT. Swing has come a long way.
"not if you only target 1.1"
If you target java 1.4 or below you are pretty much guaranteed that all JVMs that came out in the last decade are compatible. Besides I just
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If you're reaching down into Java2D to do complex rendering, which is what I'm doing, Swing performance was very poor. Now, maybe there's 1.5-specific techniques that will speed things up, but the code I wrote for 1.4.2 doesn't run significantly faster in 1.5.
> If you target java 1.4 or below you are pretty much guaranteed that all JVMs that came out in the last decade are compatible
Yeah, right. Every commercial java ap
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Probably. Because I think I've seen VS7 crash maybe twice. And because all of my coworkers and pretty much everyone I talk to online, from total linux nerd to VB hackers, all agree that whatever MS's other failings, VS7 is pretty sweet. Given that, yeah, I would say that whatever problems VS7 is causing you are probab
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pretty much everyone I talk to online, from total linux nerd to VB hackers, all agree that whatever MS's other failings, VS7 is pretty sweet.
that's probably the most wretched piece of blasphemy i've ever seen coming out of a slashdotter's (slashbot's? don't want to offend) greasy little fingers.
/goes to wash eyeballs
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Even simpler (Score:2, Insightful)
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I mean, it sounds to me like this guy has to deal with Windows for at least eight hours of his day if that's what he uses to do development work. So why not get a development PC and use Remote Desktop (yes, a client exists for Mac)? The GUI is actually very responsive, and seeing as how he's complaining about Parallels refreshing the entire desktop every time a character is typed, I think using a PC via Remote Desktop will w
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Actually, I think that's something to do with Visual Studio. I've noticed exactly the same thing when using Visual Studio over Remote Desktop Connection via a VPN on an old slow machine (at my end): VS appears to redraw the entire contents of the editor window for every keystroke.
Also note that he only perceived
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Quartz Debug does slow things down, but he didn't use it to see how fast it was but *which parts of the screen are being redrawn*.
I'll have to agree with the solution. I thrive in Mac OS X
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I've noticed this too. In fact, with VS2k3, I had a problem where after several hours, text would start getting mangled in the graphical blitting in the text area. It was as though VS2k3 was using DirectDraw to render the textbox
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He's not developing for Windows on another platform, for any useful definition of 'platform' (or for any useful definition of 'environment', as it was described in the summary). He's developing for Windows on ... Windows XP. Running on an x86 box. I'm really not sure what's supposed to be so newsworthy about someone r
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Regarding
Um... huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he's developing
The only tip someone might find useful in this blog post is his informal test of memory settings in Parallels.
Geee.... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a bit harsh. I do the exact same thing as this guy does. I Prefer working with OS.X or failing that Linux as a Desktop OS to working with Windows and I sometimes develop for OS.X and Linux in my spare time using native tools. However at work I also have to use Windows for development purposes as well as for testing and for Windows only apps so I have solved the problem with Parallels and it suits me just fine for all sorts of reasons. For one thing I don't have to deal with the headache of having to juggle a Windows laptop for work as well as a the Mac because Parallels enables me to cram the whole lot, Windows, OS.X and all the devel tools onto my MacBook and a pint sized external drive for the Parallels image files I am not using at the moment. At home I have a more powerful development system built on the same concept but running VMWare for doing stuff my MBP and Parallels can't handle but unfortunately my employer is not that progressive and does everything via test systems managed by the IT department through an inflexible bureaucracy. Fortunately I am usually able to quickly set up a pre built Linux/Windows/Unix testing/development environment on my Mac and get a whole pile of work done in the time it takes the overworked guys in the IT department to find a machine and get a test environment up and running. Basically, thanks to Parallels, I can whip up a prebuilt instance of any operating system that runs on an Intel processor with in a matter of minutes without having to endure Windows as my primary Desktop OS and all this without ever rebooting anything other than a VM, which from my point of view is paradise. I'm not saying this is something every developer should do but this approach has it's advantages.
Re:Geee.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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(Seriously, if I had the money, I'd get myself a MacBook and do the same thing. Alas, I will probably wait until my Toshiba finally dies...)
I got lost in time (Score:1)
Too many tense changes in one paragraph. Somebody please teach this guy how to compose.
Lame and pointless (Score:2)
-matthew
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Yea it is lame. If he was using QT, Java, or Mono to develop his application and set up Windows and Linux testing environments under parallels then it would be interesting.
MacBook & Parallels is a good combination... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:MacBook & Parallels is a good combination.. (Score:2)
A summary (Score:2)
Zzzzzzzz....The seamonkey has my money...zzzz... (Score:2)
Re:A summary (Score:5, Funny)
Walrus?
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No, I am.
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"No you're not", said Little Nikita.
You know, it's sad when I'm quoting from music that came out before most of us were born.
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I found the article very useful (Score:3, Informative)
It will be very beneficial to me when I finally get this platform set up to test the memory allocation in the manner the author describes, and assuming I don't take the plunge and get a Mac Pro, 2GB RAM will be the amount of RAM I choose for the Macbook Pro. After reading the article I can now purchase a new Mac and know that I can do everything I'm wanting.
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"Rise"??!? (Score:2)
I have been doing this for about a month. (Score:2)
About a month ago I went ahead and purchased a 20" Imac for use in my home. My wife uses it during the day for email and web browsing, and in the evening, I run Parallels with windows XP to use Autocad and Visual Basic
Typically, when I am runing Parallels, I don't have a lot of apps open in OSX, so my XP runs quite well with just 512mb of my 2gbs of memory allicated to it.
virtual pc (Score:2)
Missing some exposition (Score:2)
I currently have Parallels set to 768MB, I would have liked to see his reasoning for the tweak to 800MB.
Welcome to 7 years ago! (Score:2)
And I still do that to this day. 99% of the applications I develop are cross platform Linux/Mac/Windows and VMware lets me do most of that on the same machine. I do still have to use my PPC Mac some but eventually I'll either be running OSX in VMware or similar
Then is not the same as than (Score:2)
It does to me. (Score:2)
The fact that it works on Parallels fairly nicely means that you no longer need to buy two machines for the Mac guys (just make sure there's enough RAM in there), and that you can do porting in either direction w/o all the wasted time in transferring files...
Re:It does to me. (Score:4, Insightful)
Running 2 IDEs isn't the challenge. Parallels has been out for a while and now there is VMWare Beta. I'd be surprised if you COULDN'T run VS.NET in virtualization.
I'd actually be interested in hearing how you managed to get a project to build in both XCode and VS.NET. I mean, just the lanaguage barrier alone would be a problem. I mean, you have Objective-C/Java for XCode and C++/C#/VB in VS.NET. Were they different code bases, or what? That is the kind of thing I wish this article talked about. Just running Parallels on a MacBook is uninteresting.
-matthew
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BTW - you can use straight-up C/C++ w/ only a little setup in both IDE's (yes, Xcode
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Ah, QT. So the app wasn't native Cocoa. Shame, really. Mind if I ask what app this was/is? Would I know it?
-matthew
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HTH,
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C++ works everywhere (but I'd be very interested to hear what GUI toolkit he was using).
Also, by the way, aren't encapsulation and modularity two of the first things a CS student learns? It seems reasonable to me that he could have written the core of the program in cross-platform C++ and then have written two interfaces, one in Cocoa and
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Sounds like they used QT. So it was all C++. As an OSX user though, i'd probably rather a program come with a native Objective-C/Interface Builder GUI and just use a common C++ core like you say. Although I don't know how well Objective-C interf
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Running Ubuntu 6.06 as my main desktop with vmware player setup for XP.
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I wish more developers would take a very modulular MVC approach when doing
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Let's take it apart
Interesting blog peice... Oxymoron?
Entitled: Memoirs of a Bystander: Visual Studio.NET development on OS X w/ Parallels. Well, perhaps this is meaningful to someone who is a programmer. Pretty much incoherent to everyone else.
The piece does a good job talking about development for different environments then the one that you are programming in.
I think this would start to make sense if the THEN replaced a THAN.
And with the continued rise of more and more h
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Nope, no meaning to programmers either. Especially since the article had nothing to do with programming. The fact that he was running VS.NET was actually inconsequential. It could have been any demaning Windows applications that he just had to run on his Mac...
-matthew
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Sure it is. Unless you want to run 1.5 on 10.3, in which case you're SOL.
'first class citizen' my butt.
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Great. How does that help me with older java apps that require 1.4?
> i don't remember seeing a
That is a complete nonsequiter. I was talking about Java, not
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Secondly, Apple does install Java in a way that can host multiple versions:
Happy?
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No, because my problem was that I need to run 1.5 apps on OS 10.3, not that I needed to run 1.4 apps under a 1.5 JVM.
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Write once! Run anywhere! Woohoo!!!
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> Great. How does that help me with older java apps that require 1.4?
when I should have said
> Great. How does that help me run java 1.5 apps on OS 10.3?
Sorry, I seem to have gotten a little confused there.
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