After getting increasingly frustrated with a 5-year old operating system (Windows XP) I decided to buy a MacBook. But what's an ASP.Net developer to do when they rely on Visual Studio? Why - run it on a Mac.
I present, Visual Web Developer on a Mac:
Here are the exact steps to do this. First you need the brilliant Parallels Desktop for Mac Virtual Machine with Windows installed. The trick is to use RDP to display only the Visual Web Developer window within the Mac environment using the open source rdesktop and seamlessRDP.
With the developer tools installed from Apple's install CD, I did the following from a terminal:
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@rdesktop.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/rdesktop login
$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@rdesktop.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/rdesktop co -P rdesktop
$ cd rdesktop
$ ./bootstrap
$ sudo -s
# ./configure
# make
# make install
# exit
Create a shell script containing:
#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/rdesktop -A -a 16 -s "c:\seamlessrdp\seamlessrdpshell.exe C:\Program Files\
Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\VWDExpress.exe" 192.168.7.195
replacing the IP address above with the IP address of your Windows VM. Name the shell script "seamless".
Make it executable:
$ chmod 755 seamless
On the Windows VM, grab seamlessrdp.zip from http://www.cendio.com/seamlessrdp and extract into c:\seamlessrdp
Make sure you've opened up the Remote desktop port in the Windows Firewall and allowed users to connect via remote desktop in the System control panel applet.
Log off from Windows. You won't get the single-window experience if you're not logged off. Also, it's a good idea to turn the screen saver off.
Then from the Mac, run:
$ open-x11 seamless
And hey-presto! Visual Web Developer running inside of MacOS!
Props to http://fastfin.net/seamless/ for some of the help with this.
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