Developing .net web apps on a mac

A while ago, I had to buy a new PC as my 2 main development machines (one for .net 2.0 and one for .net 1.1) were getting flakier and flakier. I decided to buy an iMac and experiment with virtual machines.

Well these last few weeks I have been running Visual Studio 2005 in a Parallels virtual machine without a hitch. In fact I owuld say it's even better than under my regular PC (an ageing Dell).

For a start, the screen on my iMac is the big 24" high resolution screen, so I get much more display space than 1280x1024. Even though the PC has dual monitors, as they are different resolutions, it never really helped.

Next, the Parallels VM never seems to forget the network drives that I keep my code on. Under native windows, my PCs tend to give up and either take A G E S to opena network folder or file from the nertwork or just give up altogther.

There are some issues; the keyboard was a bit wierd at first, but you simply have to ignore what's on the kecaps and poress the key that you would under Windows. eg. to the right of the left shift key. On the PC this is labelled as Pipe and backslash. On the Mac it is tilde and a diacritical mark. Under Parallels, it responds the same as under Windows. There are a few others like Home/End/Insert/Delete as well. But I'm getting used to them.

So I've only really just started on this model, but it's great so far. I think I may carry on with Macs next time as well...