Close to Switching

Hey All,

I am currently a pc developer and I am about 99% sure I would like to make the switch to the new MacBook Pro notebook. The remaining 1% is all of my clients run my developed windows applications and I still need to provide support. Is anyone developing windows applications using Parralels on the new Intel macs? Further...can anyone offer any advice on the Parralels program itself? Plenty of good reviews, but I am about to milk that app for all its worth and I have to be sure it will keep up.

Thanks

Matt

i haven't used it yet (probably getting it as needed in a few months), but i have used VMware on Linux, its pretty much the same, basically everything will work and you will experience almost no problems, the differences being that it does video in software and (i think) can only offer 1 CPU to the guest OS

those aren't really a problem though, it kinda runs the guest OS like you have a single core CPU with a low end on board video card, so no games or anything else that really uses the video card, if you need to use the full power you can use bootcamp

also programs like parallels are very very RAM hungry, if your going to use it a lot then get 2 GB of RAM (BTW its cheaper to buy it with 2x512MB and then buy 2x1GB from newegg, saved me a good $120 even after Apples developer discount, they seem to think their RAM is made of gold or something)

RAM hungry is fine, I will be purchasing the 2GB From Apple direct. How is the drive mapping in bootcamp? If i boot in windows for some development time, do i still have access to my files on the mac "partition"?

windows can't read HSF+, though i think there are a few third party things to add support, OS X can read but not write to NTFS, it can read/write FAT

and that's one of the biggest advantages of something like parallels, both OSs gets to use its native filesystem and you get drivers for windoze that let you drag files between the OS (i think), and even without that you can always set up a file server on both OS's and read/write to both through that over a virtual NATed LAN

good solution with the file server. Got that setup right here in the office and ready to go. Answers are often right in front of you lol. This may seem like a dumb question, but i have to be as "deer in the headlights" as i can before making this expensive and "risky" switch. Can I compile C++ on my mac?

yea, every new mac/OSX comes with Xcode, through you need to install it separately (its on the install CD but not installed), it adds gcc and all needed stuff for C/C++

if i compile an application in xcode using the C++ language, can i deploy that application to a windows based machine?

no, OSX has a very different structure then windows, many of its core libraries are BSD like, the stuff for the GUI is unique to OSX so all that code is specific to OSX (though you can write it to use X like BSD/Linux does, but that requires the user installs X11 from the install CD and you don't get Aqua with those things), OSX also handles the libraries differently and there are a few differences with how you should use gcc, so most code getting ported from a UNIX OS needs a few includes modified and the makefiles modified, and if you want to take advantage of Aqua you would need to add in all new code for that

if your porting something from windows, then pretty much all the system libraries are different, its a lot like porting it to Linux

OSX also have a very different file structure for the actual application, you put all your code and resources into a .app folder (generated by the tools provided with Xcode) and its recognized as an application, all binaries can be compiled to support multiple architectures at the same time and because everything is in one folder you can just drag and drop to perform an install

you should probably read more at the developer site

ok thank you. I am probobly an oaf for sitting here and persisting in my resistance to Mac OS. I think what it really comes down to is what side do I want to be on? I have a lot of clients who run my windows software, i just want to break my mold and get an OS that will actually keep up with me (without sounding arrogant). Mac is sweet, i keep finding myself back on the apple page every hour or so finding out something new. Thanks for your help.

Matt