Good bye Microsoft! MS employee and author of 9 Visual Basic books has now left the building (for RoR).

1GB might be enough RAM if you don't use Parallels, but with Parallels, forget it. Running Windows XP with less than 1GB RAM while trying to do anything intensive is torture, and running Visual Studio certain qualifies. So you'd probably need 2GB, with 1GB allocated to your virtual machine.

Heck, even that might not be enough for you. I have a MacBook Pro (2.33ghz C2D) with 2GB, and Parallels slows my machine down enough that I don't leave it running unless I'm actively using it. (To be fair, I tend to leave a lot of OS X apps open at a time.) I'm probably going to upgrade to 3GB one of these days and see if that helps -- I've read in a couple of blog posts that's really Parallels' RAM sweet spot.

In any event, if you're not sure, you can always just buy the MacBook and upgrade the RAM later. In fact, I've read that you can even stick 3GB in the MacBook, even though Apple advertises 2GB as being the limit.

As far as Dell monitors go -- I got one recently (3007WFP -- I do IT work for my father and get paid in merchandise :)). It works great as a monitor, but I've been having issues with the built-in USB hub, to the point that I can't really use it (when it's plugged in and the computer goes to sleep, it either immediately wakes it or causes a kernel panic a large percentage of the time).