Using a Mac Book Pro for .Net development

Most of my work involves .Net development so I needed a windows based laptop. I had narrowed down my choice to a Lenovo Thinkpad X series and Mac Book Pro simply because of their build quality, having a one year old running wild teaches you to appreciate some of the finer elements of a laptop I guess. However the Mac Book Pro offered so much more for about 500$ less.

I really like the magnetic power cord (forgetting that the power cord is still plugged to the wall problem has disappeared now) and illuminated keyboard, even the aluminum casing and illuminated apple logo makes it a real sexy beast. There still are some draw backs, you will need a copy of windows to start with and a Mouse! Even though the touch pad is click-able its rather awkward for windows use.

So come Thanks Giving sales and I just had to have one for 200$ less than the normal price.

Soon I got down to the fun part of installing windows vista on it. I must say that the install went pretty smoothly. But once I booted into Vista I found that most drivers were missing, I couldn't even get the networking to work :(

So whats the solution, just use the Leopard DVD that ships with the Mac book pro it has all the drivers in it. I had to do a bit of searching around before I figured it out. Here's a link on how to install Vista on your Mac Book Pro.

So far Ive installed VS2008 and SQL Express on it and I haven't come across anything weird yet but I haven't actually gotten any work done on it yet, I'm sure Ill get down to it sooner or later.

Between I have been having fun with Mac Os too. So its been fun trying to do somethings a little different. More on my dev experiences on the Mac Book Pro soon...


Update - 17 Dec 2009

So I finally got down to setting up an existing project on the Mac Book Pro. Ran the build and voila it works like a charm! I can see my web app in Firefox. I'm so excited now its just as fast as my windows based desktop with 4 gigs of DDR and Quad core Phenom processor. Id be interested to hear from anyone who has found any issues with this kind of dev setup.

I came across another OR mapping tool having used LLBGen and Nhibernate this was somehow quite refreshing Subsonic by Rob Conery. Its really simple to use at least version 3.0 and you can do all the development within the VS IDE which is awesome. Really like the .tt code generation templates that you can build from within Visual Studio
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Spring is here and I have been trying to get as much fresh air and sun as possible.

The code camp was very interesting got a peek at f# and the asynchronous programming model that improves performance greatly, but couldn't the f# constructs be incorporated into the C# language. As a developer I could do with not having to learn a whole lot of new syntax don't get me wrong, its fun to learn new stuff but why relearn something that you have already learnt?

To illustrate my point we use the "using" keyword in C# to specify libraries we wish to include in our class files. With F# this keyword is now 'open' while this is a trivial example, I do begin to wonder if I am venting too early and before long someone will come up with a standard F# library or framework that is wrapped in C# code?

That apart I have been working towards my MCPD certification, its been worth it really and recommend the self paced training kit even if you arent taking up the the Exam.