As a.NET developer, I’ve spent most of my time coding on Windows machines. It’s only logical: Visual Studio is the richest development experience for building C# and VB.NET applications, and it only runs on Windowsright? When I joined Stormpath to work on our, I was handed a MacBook Pro and given an interesting challenge: can a Mac be an awesome.NET development platform? To my surprise, the answer is yes! I’ll share how I turned a MacBook Pro into the ultimate Visual Studio development machine. How to Run Visual Studio on a Mac Visual Studio doesn’t run natively on OS X, so my first step was to get Windows running on my MacBook Pro.

(If you want an editor that does run natively, or might fit the bill). There are multiple options for running Windows on a Mac. Every Mac comes with Apple’s Boot Camp software, which helps you install Windows into a separate partition. To switch between OSes, you need to restart. Is a different animal: it runs Windows (or another guest OS) inside a virtual machine.

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This is convenient because you don’t have to restart your computer to switch over to Windows. Instead, Windows runs in an OS X application window. I found that a combination of both worked best for me. I installed Windows into a Boot Camp partition first, and then turned that partition into an active Parallels virtual machine. This way, I have the option of using Windows in the virtual machine, or restarting to run Windows natively at full speed. I was initially skeptical of the performance of a heavy application like Visual Studio running in a virtual machine.

The option to restart to Windows via Boot Camp gave me a fallback in case Visual Studio was sluggish. There are some minor disadvantages to this method: you can’t pause the virtual machine or save it to a snapshot. A non-Boot Camp virtual machine doesn’t have these limitations. This guide will work regardless of what type of virtual machine you create. After three months of serious use, and some tweaks, I’ve been very impressed with Parallels’ performance.

I haven’t needed to boot directly to Windows at all. (For comparison, my host machine is a 15” mid-2015 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB flash drive.) In the remainder of this guide, I’ll detail the steps I took to optimize both Parallels and Visual Studio to run at peak performance. Installing Windows With Boot Camp and Parallels This part’s easy. Super nintendo mac os x emulator. I followed to install Windows in a separate partition. Then, I installed Parallels and followed the to create a new virtual machine from the existing Boot Camp partition. Tweaking Parallels for Performance and Usability The Parallels team publishes on how to maximize the performance of your virtual machine.

Here’s what I adopted: Virtual machine settings: • 2 virtual CPUs • 4096MB system memory • 256MB graphics memory Parallels options: • Optimization: Faster virtual machine, Adaptive hypervisor, Tune Windows for speed all turned on. • Sharing: Shared cloud, SmartMount, and Access Windows folders from Mac turned off, as I didn’t need these for my workflow. I experimented with both of Parallels’ presentation modes, Coherence and Full Screen. While it was cool to see my Windows apps side-by-side with OS X in Coherence mode, I found that the UI responsiveness (especially opening and closing windows and dialogs) felt sluggish. Because of this, I use Full Screen exclusively now. I have Windows full-screen on my external Thunderbolt display, and OS X on my laptop. If I need to use OS X on my large monitor, I can swipe the Magic Mouse to switch desktops.

Adjusting OS X and Windows Features I fixed a few annoyances and performance drains right off the bat: • Function keys. If you’re using the Mac keyboard, you’ll want to change the function key behavior so the F1-F12 keys work correctly in Visual Studio. From System Preferences – Keyboard, make sure Use all F1, F2, etc. Keys as standard function keys is checked. With this turned on, hold Fn to use the Mac functions (brightness, volume, etc.) on F1-F12. With an external non-Mac keyboard, this isn’t an issue. • Start menu.

I’m using Windows 8, and the removal of the Start menu annoyed me. I clung to my old ways and installed to restore it. • Disable Windows visual effects. I turned off most of the Windows desktop manager visual effects by going to Control Panel – System and Security – Advanced system settings – Advanced – Performance – Settings – Visual Effects and choosing Adjust for best performance. However, I left Smooth edges of screen fonts checked because it improves text rendering on my monitor.