I’ve seen it asked a bit but people always turn to VMs on Mac to do .Net dev. I have the option for work (Windows vs Mac) as a dev machine. And I am a 100% .Net developer. Management studio. Docker Desktop. Visual Studio 2019. Etc.
Can all this be done within Bootcamp? I don’t have reason to be in MacOS. But really like the screen and hardware of Mac. It’s better spec’d than the Windows laptop in offer.
What type of .NET development do you do?
Bootcamp works—but many of the things that make Mac hardware great comes down to integration between the software and hardware. I think you will find that the trackpad, battery life, and screen on the Mac won’t be as good if you’re running Windows.
As a .NET developer whose personal device is a Mac, I think you should probably go with the Windows machine unless your tools are all MacOS compatible (.NET Core/5, etc.)
Thanks. That does make sense. The Mac I am offered has a slightly larger screen and Retina display which I believe is pretty good. I’m on the backend side of development – so WebAPI, SQL Server (I prefer management studio as an IDE). That sort of stuff.
I’d you like Macs you should give .net development in Mac a chance. My laptop is a mac and windows does not run as smooth as macOS in the hardware so I use vs code or visual studio for mac for most development and only if I really need to I use windows in boot camp.
I haven’t looked at VS2019 (??) on Mac. Is it fully functional? Like Windows version? Or is it lagging on features?
Also – what is the Mac equivalent of Management Studio?
What sort of Dev are you doing? Is it wpf or winforms? If so, you’ll probably want to run Windows, so emulation may not be that great.
If you’re writing server side code in dotnet core (e.g, Asp.Net) then you won’t need Windows, and so can quite happily develop in Visual Studio for Mac. It’s a great experience, I’ve been developing in dotnet for a couple of years now without Windows on any hosts at home.