My main Windows development PC, running Vista Business, is getting a little long in the tooth and I’m considering replacement. Its a dual screen setup with 24″ and 19″ monitors. My laptop is a reasonably new Macbook and I’ve been using Parallels to mount a Virtual XP system on it for some time and have been pretty impressed.
The new Mac Minis appear to have dual screen support, and I’m wondering about replacing the PC box with a fully spec’ed (4Gb Ram, 2.3Ghz processor) Mac mini and mounting Parallels VM environments for development. On the face of it this has a lot of attractions – clean development environments etc. but I’d appreciate any advice from anyone who has taken a similar approach – is it feasible and robust enough for general day to day development work?
My specific development requirements are that all my clients are predominantly PC based and over two thirds of my development work is now web based anyway. However I do have a couple of legacy Delphi 6 systems (and I’m considering a Delphi 2009 upgrade) and one .Net 1.1 Windows Mobile application. I also have a considerable number of Access/SQL Server applications I look after, all those these are generally coded directly on clients machines and the need to replicate locally is rare, it would however be useful. There’s also the possibility of Win32 based development in the future, and I tend to do a lot with 3D and OpenGL technologies. For non-coding applications I also run and use Maya and Photoshop on the PC fairly regularly.
I bought an Aluminum MacBook a couple months ago, got additional ram in order to have 4 gigs and I’ve successfully virtualized Windows XP with 3D acceleration using VMWare Fusion. I’m currently developing web applications using PHP and Javascript, some other projects with Java and playing around a little bit with XNA 3.1, all on my MacBook .. so, If this works for me it could work for you too!