I finally decided to get a new laptop to support at my home development process.   My previous laptop was a three year old IBM Think Pad.  Unfortunately, trying to run Visual Studio 2008 (with many of the new additions) and Office 2007 was painfully slow.  Basically, I found myself waiting 5-10 minutes between builds on large scale projects.

                While researching which laptop to get, the hardware was the easy part.  My dream choice was an Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB Ram and 200 GB @ 7200 rpm.  The much harder question was which brand: IBM, Dell, Sony or another computer.  After quite a bit of research, I decided why not a MAC?

                One might think; how does one run Visual Studio on a Mac?  Vmware fusion is the answer.  If you have never tried developing on a virtual machine, it is must.  Moreover, when you can run Windows Server 2008 and Vista Ultimate simultaneously to replicate a SOA environment is amazing.  Furthermore, debugging the SOA environment is a breeze with the .NET remote debugger.

                Another benefit of virtual machines is the ability to save states.  The obvious reason is recovery; however, two other reasons are more useful in daily development.  First, the ability to suspend a development session and restart, at a later time, exactly where you left off.  Furthermore, the restarting of session seems faster than restarting the operating system and visual studio.  Second, the ability pass a session to a fellow developer is quite useful.  Basically, this saves quite a bit of time explaining setup procedures to another developer.

                Finally, I choose Vmware over Parallels mainly because of the dual core support.  The Unity view allows me to seamlessly browse the web in safari and program in visual studio.  Though I don’t do much website design, I could imagine such a scenario could be quite useful.

                All in all, I am very happy with my current enviorment.