Someone asked whether there would be any issues programming WPF in using a virtual machine on a mac. I have tried lots of new things this past year, and one of them happens to be Parallels on a MacBook (OSX 10.4).
I installed several betas and CTPs using Parallels and Windows XP. It works great - I love Parallels - it's the best VM I've ever used and it keeps getting better. So long as you try not to switch between operating system windows too often, you can almost forget you're using a virtual machine.
The only disadvantage I have using it is that WPF is not hardware accelerated (see graphics rendering tiers). In everyday development this is not a problem, but if you have intense animations, this might become noticeable.
That said, I think everyone should test their WPF apps to see what they look like without hardware acceleration. In my sample of 6 or so computers (admittedly not purchased this year), I have only gotten hardware acceleration when I went out and bought a specifically compatible video card.
I have not tried bootcamp, and in the past year Mac has released a new OS and Parallels continues to improve its DirectX support, so YMMV.
1 comment:
Damn. I'm gonna havta go get a copy of Parallels. My mission will be to run the Sun Wireless Toolkit, which alas is not ported to the OS X.
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