10 Reasons .NET developers should consider the switch to Mac OS

[steve907]

Well now we've gone off-topic into the endless Java vs. NET debate. I
won't embrace a discussion on tha because while I am predominately
a .NET developer and have been for the past six years, I've also kept
a watchful eye on Java and I've seen firsthand the benefits Java can
offer to the Enterprise over .NET.

.NET works fantastic as long as all your servers are running
Microsoft, but integration with non-Microsoft technologies has become
the focus of so much of my work. Java's cross-platform nature can
simply handles a lot of these sort of problems better because of it's
platform independent nature. Yes .NET is an ECMA standard, but
practical advantage does that give it over Java which today literally
runs everywhere.

When I considered focusing on Java around the time of .NET 1.0 my
reasons for sticking with .NET were 1. Windows dominance 2. Java
runtime performance issues 3. Lack of enterprise grade RAD development
tools (they existed, but they were quite horrible compared to
VS.NET).

Today things have changed: 1. .NET's lack of cross-platform support
has become a handica as non Microsoft server platforms gain market
share and integration becomes the leading problem for workflow,  2.
Performance wise Java and .NET have become neck and neck  3. At this
stage, the best RAD development tools are open source and .NET's
marriage to Visual Studio.NET has also become a hindrance.

Combine the above with new Microsoft technologies such as Silverlight
and compaire that to what other vendors are doing (e.g. Flex 3.0) and
you begin to see this trend. (side note: Mark Anders who worked for
Microsoft and has been credited as the "father of ASP.NET" left
Microsoft to work with Adobe and is largely responsible for Flex 2.0
and 3.0, if you love ASP.NET you'll find it's been carefully designed
to cater to the structure you're custom to AND Flex is a fantastic
framework for building Rich Internet Applications that puts
Silverlight to shame, but I digress)

There's been a slow exodus at Microsoft over the past five years and
it's something too many corporate software developers ignore. It
effects us because some people are paying attention. Sticking with the
Flex example if you do a job search on Flex vs Silverlight you may be
suprised, Silverlight jobs are almost non-existent. .NET jobs may be
aroudn another 20 years or longer, there are positions for COBOL
programmers working on mainframes today, but the question is do you
want to be doing that type of work or do you want to stay with what's
current.

I fell for this whole thing. I have been a Windows developer for 15
years and was finally swayed by all the hype in the market. I spent
$3,000 on a new MacBook Pro, 4gb, Leopard, iWorks, Office Mac 2008,
Airport Express, Fusion, and a few other goodies.

My experience:

- Some parts of the Mac OS design are brilliant - amazingly good.
Time Machine is superb. Other parts are brain-dead. Finder is a very
painful way to work with folders. Networking is a chore.
Installations are confusing. At one point, I tried to create a 2nd
partition on the disk and it got confused. After 2 hours with Apple
support, the solution was to re-format the drive.
- Discoverability. The 20% of the features that we use 80% of the
time are easy to figure out. The rest of it is buried deep. Example:
try to rename a group of files with one operation. Brutal.
- Fusion does not work as well as VM Workstation. One snapshot only.
Poor graphics performance.
- Bootcamp is downright flaky. The service frequently loses its
settings and requires re-installation.
- The menu system is just pointless. No windows open but the app
still displays controls the desktop menu? Too weird.
- One button mouse. This is pure arrogance on Apple's part. Many
functions in the OS are dependent on the right button, but they can't
provide one because it would be too much like MS.

In summary, a nice solid OS with its own niggling problems and a
significant learning curve (if you're not just a casual user). Oh,
and REALLY good marketing.

It was a relief to to go back to clunky annoying Vista. At least I
could get some work done.

 

[Mr. Arnold]

I fell for this whole thing. I have been a Windows developer for 15
years and was finally swayed by all the hype in the market. I spent
$3,000 on a new MacBook Pro, 4gb, Leopard, iWorks, Office Mac 2008,
Airport Express, Fusion, and a few other goodies.


Not that I am saying you are stupid, but no one in their right mind is
stupid enough to fall for his tap dance that's working on the MS platform.
Most professionals are locked in to their careers and don't have time for
the non-sense that he is spewing, which means to make that jump, he or she
would be taking a serious pay cut and that can't happen for most not in
today's environment.

Unfortunately, he is spewing the same nonsense in the C# NG, under another
name.

Maybe some armatures will listen to his advice and wind up getting burnt,
but for sure, no .NET professional would touch his advice with a ten foot
poll.

There is some swampland in Mississippi they can sale him too. He just
shouldn't bring it to the MS .NET NG(s) trying to sale it, as no one is
buying it.

 

[Rory Becker]

Hello RMZ,

You have a right to post your opinion and I respect it, but I also
disagree you on what is proper for these forums. Should I get the
notion to post a "soapbox" piece again, your free to throw the
tomatoes, but you won't stop me

I would suggest that, while your experience is potentially interesting, this
newsgroup is perhaps not the best place for it's discussion.

The name of this newsgroup is "Microsoft.Public.DotNet.Languages.VB" (or
thereabouts)

By the best definition available, (the newsgroup's name) it is clearly intended
for 1 of 2 things....

....discussions about the VB language as it pertains to the .Net framework.
....coding questions about the .Net framework whose answers are required in
VB.

There has been endless debate (If I recall correctly this is usually by Cor
and Herfried. No offense guys I appreciate all your posts ) about which
of these definitions is most appropriate.

However one thing you may be sure of, is that any consensus that might be
arrived at by the majority of people in this group would indicate that discussions
should relate to post VB6 VB.

The only way I can see your post being relevant to a .Net developer is in
a general sense.

That being the case you might find "Microsoft.Public.DotNet.General" a better
place for such discussions as your post has nothing to do with VB.Net whatsoever.


I would also have guessed "Microsoft.Public.DotNet.Framework" or "Microsoft.Public.DotNet.Framework.Performance"
would be far better locations for a discussion of this type than in a clearly
labelled vb newsgroup.

If you start a soapbox thread in a forum and ignore it's most obvious purpose
then I suspect you will get this type of response almost anywhere.

In this newsgroup I would guess, it is considered something between Noise,
Spam and fanboy spoutings. (probably all 3) but again, that is within the
context of this forum.

I pass no judgement on the Mac itself but I am another person who thinks
this entire thread is out of place at best.

 

[rowe_newsgroups]

There has been endless debate (If I recall correctly this is usually by Cor

and Herfried.  No offense guys I appreciate all your posts ) about which
of these definitions is most appropriate.

Don't forget Armin!



Thanks,

Seth Rowe [MVP]

 

[rowe_newsgroups]

This may come across as a trolling message, it's not ment to be. It's
intended to share a recent experience I had with Mac OS in an
entertaining way. I'm doing this because I love technology in general
and most programmers I know are passionate about technology,
unfortunately many of them stay away from Mac. Some as if it's the
forbidden fruit (you know you're out there) and others because they
think it's OS for people who aren't intelligent enough "to use a real
computer" as someone recently put it to me. I admit I was one of these
people less than two years ago, but I've found Mac OS to be, frankly
the most power desktop OS I've played with or tried to develop for.
The word "Magic" isn't a perfect fit, bit it's the first word that
comes to mind (Chuck Palahniuk, that's for you).

So I recently had the opportunity to toy around with a Pystar System,
if you are not familiar with this company they produce a generic $399
bare-bones PC capable of running Mac OS retail version without
requiring an OS loader hack. (yes, I know about the legal issues with
their license agreement and doing this, i'm not promoting Pystar and
when I transition to Mac OS it will be on Apple branded hardware, bear
with me).

So having the opportunity to play with Mac OS, Windows XP and Vista on
a $399 Pystar my first observation was performance differences. Simply
put everything is faster- everything. From the apparent refresh rate
as you glide the mouse cursor. To the time it takes programs to
launch, to the response time when shutting programs down. On Mac OS
Leopard 10.5 I was able to open three QuickTime movie trailers at 720p
(HD resolution) and have a windowed Open GL 2.0 game going. With zero
slow down (not even a hiccup) as I clicked through to bring each of
these windows to the top there is no problem. So this leads to my
first of ten reasons I think .NET developers should consider switching
to Mac OS

1. Performance boost for day to day task.

You work on a PC, you play on your PC. While Mac OS won't make Visual
Studio.NET run any faster, it will boost the performance of many of
the other things you do on a computer. In my test on Windows XP and
Vista the results were about the same, after the 2nd 720p QuickTime
trailer got running things really got sluggish.

2. The current version of Mac OS comes with a program called Bootcamp
that makes running XP easy. That's the Apple marketing line, but the
thing of it is it really works and it's really easy. Essentially this
is partion manager, there is no emulation going on and you do need a
licensed copy of Windows to make this work, but support is built in.
So you can install Visual Studio.NET on a Mac through Bootcamp

3. Two different computing environments, one for work and one for
play.
This one will contract with a later point, but if you're a .NET only
developer, the addition of Mac OS to you life may be exactly what you
need to help separate work from play. Ideally most of you play time
would be away from a computer, but everyone does e-mail and everyone
browses the web, everyone makes a family DVD manges photos (the list
goes on). To say Mac OS does these sort of task better would be
subjective, but what I can tell is fact is that Apple provides
exceptional quality software for free to new Mac owners to handle
these task. These applications (e.g. iPhoto, iMovie, iChat, iDVD,
Garage Band) have no equal in the Windows world. The only one of these
apps to have crossed over is iTunes and chances are you're running
that in the background on Windows now. Imagine every application you
use for common task begin that well designed, power and simple to use.
That's what you get.

4. First class test environment for Mono development.
The Mono project (open source project aimed at bringing .NET cross
platform) has become a very serious effort to allow .C# .NET apps to
run on Unix platforms. The effort that's gone into Mono can really
only be appreciated when you bring a .NET .exe you compiled in Visual
Studio over to Mac OS and it just works on Mono unmodified. I have
several utility apps that I experienced this with.

5. First class Java 2 development with exceptional quality free tools
and OS support.
Java programming for Mac OS is a joy. Since Sun Microsystems and Apple
Corp get along rather well what you find on Mac OS is a large amout of
native API support available to Java. Java is as capable on Mac OS
as .NET is on Windows. In fact it's more capable because of the native
UI integration (Mac OS comes with a optimized Java virtual machine
that seems to run near native code speed, with plenty of native API
wrappers ready to go and well documented..... for example want to play
or capture video using QuickTime, you can do that on Mac OS using Java
in a few hours of coding. Want to take advantage of the nice look and
feel of native Apple/Mac OS apps, you don't have to do a thing, Apple
has made it so Java's Swing (their counterpart to WinForms) is mapped
to Mac OS UI components. So Java apps look like native apps on Mac.

6. Imagine this: all the best development tools for the Mac OS
platform are 100% free to use.
Apple's coutnerpart to Visual Studio.NET is XCode, this tool and all
compilers come included on the Mac OS DVD or can be downoaded free for
commercial and private use. With XCode you can develop native Mac OS
applications using Objective-C and Cocoa.

NetBeans 6.1 (Sun's open source Java IDE) seems to run at least twice
as fast on Mac OS and will make Visual Studio.NET developers feel at
home. When you install the Mac OS version of NetBeans all desktop apps
you build with Swing will maintain much of the look of native apps and
will run near (or at) native code speed. This is also free.

7. iPhone development tools are free
Last week it was reported that iPhone applications are expected to
boom to a $1 billion market in 2009. All the development tools you
need (including desktop iPhone emulator) are 100% free to download,
but they only run on Mac OS.

8. A true next generation operating system capable of running 64-bit
and 32-bit code side by side
Another little marketing spill that lives up to it's hype. You can use
the for mentioned FREE development tools to output 64-bit or 32-bit
binaries and test, run, debug them side by side on the current version
of Mac OS

9. It's Unix under the hood.
You can run many Linux applications on Mac OS because it's Unix based.
Every commercial OS except Windows it seems is based on Unix and
confirms to many Unix standards under the UI. Windows remains
isolated. That was fine and good 10 years ago when Windows 95 was all
the rage, but over the years the OS itself has become a bloated mess.
With no built in intelligence or corporate demands to stop poorly
designed device drivers (finally with Vista, but that's lead to
another mess) and more importantly a cluttered task manager and
background processes that do God knows what.

From an architecture stand point and user experience over time Windows
(yes, even Vista) seems archaic

10. Mac OS pampers its users and you deserve to be pampered.
In this industry chances are you're not doing too bad for yourself
when it comes to earning a living. Do you like the nice things in life
such as luxury cars and fine dining?  Well then why wouldn't you want
a luxury OS? Yeah, you pay a bit of a premium for Apple branded
hardware, but they are constantly rated #1 in customer service and
that extreme attention to detail bleeds over in their software design
as well.

Silly tv commercials aside, why would you settle for less doing what
you do?

I originally started this post bashing Microsoft for doing such a
horrible job evolving Windows and it was apathy that led me to avoid
that path. I like Microsoft a great deal and their technologies have
helped me earn a good income, but the thing with technology is things
are always changing and it's in the nature of our line of work to
anticipate change and to stay current. Sadly, this company that has
put out so many great things for the corporate world has failed it's
desktop users and I believe at this point they are in danger of
letting everything slip away. That won't come next year or the year
after, but ten years down the road if Windows continues to try and
play catch up with other OS's (like Mac OS) they will be abandoned.

Unfortunately, I really don't see any reason in here to justify
switching to a Mac. The biggest joke to me is point 2 - who cares that
I can dual boot a Window's installation along side OS-X? I've been
able to do that for years with Windows and any other OS - it's only a
point now that Apple change their hardware architecture to allow it. I
remember what happened when I ran XP and Red Hat as a dual boot, I
touched Red Hat maybe once a month to "play", but besides that it was
nothing more than a disk space sink-hole.

Point of this is, is that if you remove the fact I could run Windows
on Apple hardware (and give me $3k and I'd build a better development
box than the Apple one), there aren't any advantages for me (sorry
Tom, I don't consider Mono an advantage at the moment). I can however
think of several disadvantages:

(Remember these are with dual booting taken out of the picture)

1) A wasted MSDN license
2) No Visual Studio
3) No IIS
4) No IE8 betas to test
5) No Vista compatibility testing
6) Huge problems being a team player (12 PC devs and 1 Mac dev = bad
teamwork)
7) Difficulties releasing code to servers
8) Safari (I hate Safari)

And I'm sure there is more. The point is for me, that if I wanted a
development machine it would not be a Mac. I would have zero use for
the Mac tools while at work, and very limited use for them at home (it
would be another RH Fedora - nothing more than a play toy). It just
doesn't make sense to me to pay more for a box that does less!

Anyways, now that I have been properly trolled into this thread, I
shall leave the way I came.

Thanks,

Seth Rowe [MVP]

 

[Paul Clement]

¤ This may come across as a trolling message, it's not ment to be.

Kind of disingenuous don't you think? It is spam and it is off-topic (unless it involves a .NET
related issue).


Paul
~~~~
Microsoft MVP (Visual Basic)

 

[Ben white]

Just chiming in on this whole thread...
1) RMZ - Regardless of intention this does smell an awful lot like
trolling. (Spelling is important BTW) I was interested in the title
of your post but ended up blowing away a lot of useful time in what
amounted to nothing more than a lot marginally relevant pseudo-stats
and faux permis for making a decision that should only be concerned
with technical objectives. In my mind, if a person is curious about
whether or not you can do .NET well on a Mac then maybe there is some
encouragement in your words but certainly nothing one could
practically use to do it. Now if you actually posted the "Top 10
things to do when setting up your Mac to run .NET" I think we all
might be interested. As it was I feel like I was a little bit duped
(okay suckered by my own curiosity) into reading this extended
advertisement. I don't think you shouldn't post - I would just
appreciate it if you posted more relevant things from your experience.
2) Rory - thank you. I could not have said it better. I am a die
hard VB programmer in that I am coding in VB (almost always VB.NET)
pretty much every day since it's last BETA release. I joined this
group for things that relate to VB. This original post did not.
3) steve907 - you are not alone in this experience. I was recently
called in to salvage a project that a company started that was started
to exploit this cross-OS/cross-platform (hmmm .... "double cross")
platform experience that Mac/Apple is supposed to make so easy and do
so well. It was disaster. Partially because they pressed their Mac
"Hatfields" and PC "McCoys" into a group and told them not to feud but
get results. It was a blamescaping thing of beauty. Seems the feed
was all either side cared about. Cutting to the chase, the company
lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $100k and the final project was
finished with much more 'traditional' architecture. The number of
things that Apple had to concede "might not be production durable" was
astounding.

At the end of it all I agree with RMZ on one part, if I am messing
around and I have a couple of grand to blow on stuff that has very
little commercial value as a technologist I should consider
trying .NET on a Mac. I also once made a Java app call a .NET Web
Service which used VB6 DLL that called a VB.Net DLL which used a C++
executable just to see how it worked. It was an amusing experiment and
it would seem comparable to what you wrote. In your article
constantly referring only Macs as "high-end" goes a long way to show
the bias in your writing. The prevalence of that bias alone would
seem to prove the trolling contention.

The box we use certainly is just a tool. However, what you wrote
certainly isn't what I read this newsgroup for (for what that
matters).

 

[Andy B]

The guy hasn't realized yet that nobody has cared to look or answer to the
original post except to tell him that he fell off his rocker somewhere...

 

[Just_a_fan]

You know, we have Photoshop on PCs now. Why do we really need Macs any
longer? ;-)

With what Apple is doing with iPhone programming, they are FORCING folks
to use OS 10. I don't like to get FORCED to do anything!

I also don't like the way Apple bigots keep telling me how "bug free"
their environment is as I read all the bugs in various mags and the web.
It is just not true and lying is not a good way to sell something
(although it happens every day for most every product)!

Otherwise, the double to triple price for an Apple computer vs a PC is a
BIG put off for most folks.

Just my opinion.

And, yes, it does some a little like a troll!

Mike

 

[Just_a_fan]

your free to throw the
tomatoes, but you won't stop me

AT LEAST FIGURE OUT HOW TO USE YOUR LANGUAGE OF CHOICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Go get a dictionary and look up:

your - the possessive of you
you're - the contraction of "you are"

Goodness, trolls are the worst.