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Comment by zone411 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have experience running Visual Studio (not VSCode) in Parallels? I'd like to update my older MacBook Pro with Boot Camp but I'm not leaving Windows Visual Studio for a poor native Mac version.

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The Parallels desktop experience is shockingly well-accelerated. I played 1440p video from YouTube in a Microsoft Edge window (not in full-screen though) and didn't notice any appearance of dropped frames. Animations in Windows are smoother than they are on my 8th Gen Core i3 desktop.

As for full-blown Visual Studio, there is an ARM version now with most (but not all) workloads available. YMMV if you rely on those unavailable workloads or if you have x86/x64 DLLs in your project, but this has improved substantially I believe with Windows 11 ARM now supporting 64-bit/x64 translation (whereas Windows 10 ARM only supported 32-bit/x86 officially outside of Insider previews).

Parallels performance is really good. I haven't used VS specifically but it'll only choke if I'm trying demanding games. It's quite impressive.

Assuming you're doing .NET development, have you looked at JetBrains Rider?

I haven't spent much time with it myself but a lot of my colleagues swear by it even on Windows.

This. We use Rider daily on our M1s. I used to be a big fan of Visual Studio, but really loving Rider and it works as great on the Mac as it does Windows (assuming you're not working with legacy NET Framework). The only bugs we ever really run into is around Docker on the M1s, but with the current releases everything is working fine.

Do you know where support for WinUI 3 is with Rider? Been working on a little Windows utility in C#/WinUI, and VS2022 is… meh. It works but it doesn't jive with my brain as well as Xcode or something IntelliJ-based does, probably because my background has zero MS platform dev in it.

Rider on Mac is head and shoulders above VS for Windows, and the speed is addictive on the M1 Macs.

Visual Studio proper has gotten considerably faster with VS2022, though I doubt it compares to anything running natively on Apple Silicon.

I have to use VS2022 for legacy projects. People say it’s faster. It’s not. Compared to Rider it’s like being on dialup again.

Sibling comments here don't square with my experience running VS2022 under Parallels on M1 MacBook Pro. I found it unusably slow for regular work and ended up moving back to a Dell laptop. This was a year back so perhaps things have changed, curious to know if anything has changed.

I use VS 2019 in Parallels with SSRS/SSIS and .Net Framework projects with little issues. I did have a problem with IIS Express breaking after each Windows update (fixed by uninstalled it and downloading the most recent from Msft) but that seems to have fixed. Now that Rider has an ARM build I use that for my 1 remaining .Net Framework project and it works fine.

The Mac version of Visual Studio isn't even Visual Studio. It's a glorified MonoDevelop.

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