In the remainder of this guide, I’ll detail the steps I took to optimize both Parallels and Visual Studio to run at peak performance. (For comparison, my host machine is a 15” mid-2015 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB flash drive.)

I haven’t needed to boot directly to Windows at all. This guide will work regardless of what type of virtual machine you create.Īfter three months of serious use, and some tweaks, I’ve been very impressed with Parallels’ performance. A non-Boot Camp virtual machine doesn’t have these limitations. There are some minor disadvantages to this method: you can’t pause the virtual machine or save it to a snapshot. The option to restart to Windows via Boot Camp gave me a fallback in case Visual Studio was sluggish. I was initially skeptical of the performance of a heavy application like Visual Studio running in a virtual machine. This way, I have the option of using Windows in the virtual machine, or restarting to run Windows natively at full speed. I installed Windows into a Boot Camp partition first, and then turned that partition into an active Parallels virtual machine. I found that a combination of both worked best for me. Instead, Windows runs in an OS X application window. This is convenient because you don’t have to restart your computer to switch over to Windows. Parallels is a different animal: it runs Windows (or another guest OS) inside a virtual machine.

To switch between OSes, you need to restart. Every Mac comes with Apple’s Boot Camp software, which helps you install Windows into a separate partition. There are multiple options for running Windows on a Mac. (If you want an editor that does run natively, Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio Code might fit the bill). Visual Studio doesn’t run natively on OS X, so my first step was to get Windows running on my MacBook Pro. To my surprise, the answer is yes! I’ll share how I turned a MacBook Pro into the ultimate Visual Studio development machine. NET authentication library, I was handed a MacBook Pro and given an interesting challenge: can a Mac be an awesome. When I joined Stormpath to work on our open-source. It’s only logical: Visual Studio is the richest development experience for building C# and VB.NET applications, and it only runs on Windows…right? NET developer, I’ve spent most of my time coding on Windows machines.

Windows running on mac