Object Mentor Blog: DotNet Development Using Parallels Is No Longer Painful

DotNet Development Using Parallels Is No Longer Painful

Bob Koss — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:16:00 -0600

Because of the travel involved with being an Object Mentor, my main computer is my laptop, a MacBookPro. I have to be able to work wherever I happen to be, whether I’m at home, at Object Mentor Galactic Headquarters, or in a plane, train, or automobile. We’re allowed to buy whatever we want, and we all have independently settled on Macs, running OS X. I’ve developed on lots of different platforms over the years, but I find that OS X is the most productive development environment that I’ve ever used.

Besides the travel, we have to be jacks of all trades. One week I’m programming in Java, the next week I’m teaching a design class, and the next I’m developing in .NET. I’m able to do it all on my Mac, even the .NET work, through the magic of virtualization. I choose to run Parallels so that I’m able to run Windows as a process under OS X. Windows crashing isn’t a problem anymore, in that it doesn’t bring my entire computer down. One process just dies (or I’m forced to kill it) and I just start it up again, and all the other running processes just keep right on working.

I’m a backup fanatic. Besides having bootable backups produced using SuperDuper, I just love the way TimeMachine is built into OS X, allowing me to recover versions of any file on my computer going back months. And it’s all automatic. TimeMachine just runs in the background, keeping me safe.

But the thing about Parallels + TimeMachine that I just hate, is that Parallels stores all of Windows as one big file. A big one. Huge! So whenever I’m working in Parallels, the one big file is being changed and is going to be backed up again the next time TimeMachine runs. Needless to say this takes up a lot of space on my TimeMachine drive, but it’s also a damn nuisance. About the time that TimeMachine finishes its backup, it’s time to start all over again just because of the file size. Yet I dare not back up. I’m in the camp that believes it’s not a question of if your computer will fail, but when.

Because Parallels creates a share with my home directory on the OS X side, I thought about just keeping my source code there. That actually works, until I try to build or do anything with the code other than edit it, and then I get a security violation of some sort.

While I’m developing in Windows, I do frequent commits to git, my new favorite source code control system. It’s easy to go back to a previous version of any file, something that I can’t say about ctrl-z in Visual Studio.

The light finally lit up over my bald head. Git is a distributed version control system. Distributed doesn’t have to be any farther away than the OS X side of my file system.

I set up a git repository in OS X for every project that I work on. Then I can push/pull from/to it, just like I would do if I was working on a team project hosted on github. Why don’t I just get a private github account? This is easier and I don’t have to be connected to the net to do push/pulls.

Here are the details in case anyone wants to try it.

In a Terminal window in OS X:


            MBP:~ bob$ cd Archive/git
        MBP:git bob$ mkdir PresenterAsStateMachine.git
        MBP:git bob$ cd PresenterAsStateMachine.git
        MBP:PresenterAsStateMachine.git bob$ 

        MBP:PresenterAsStateMachine.git bob$ git --bare init
        Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/bob/Archive/git/PresenterAsStateMachine.git/
        MBP:PresenterAsStateMachine.git bob$

then, in Windows, using the bash window that comes with git:


            $ git init
        Initialized empty Git repository in c:/Documents and Settings/Administrator/My Documents/Visual Studio 2008/Projects/PresenterAsStateMachine/.git/

        $ git add .

        $ git commit -a -m "Initial commit. Ready to add state machine." 
        [master (root-commit) f844369] Initial commit.  Ready to add state machine.
         16 files changed, 795 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
         create mode 100644 .gitignore
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine.sln
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine.suo
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/Form1.Designer.cs
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/Form1.cs
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/Form1.resx
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/LoginPresenter.cs
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/LoginPresenterTest.cs
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/LoginView.cs
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/PresenterAsStateMachine.csproj
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/Program.cs
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/Properties/AssemblyInfo.cs
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/Properties/Resources.Designer.cs
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/Properties/Resources.resx
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/Properties/Settings.Designer.cs
         create mode 100644 PresenterAsStateMachine/Properties/Settings.settings

Now I set up the git repository that I had previously created in OS X as the remote:


            $ git remote add origin //.psf/Home/Archive/git/PresenterAsStateMachine.git/

        $ git push origin master
        Counting objects: 20, done.
        Compressing objects: 100% (19/19), done.
        Writing objects: 100% (20/20), 12.74 KiB, done.
        Total 20 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
        Unpacking objects: 100% (20/20), done.
        To //.psf/Home/Archive/git/PresenterAsStateMachine.git/
         * [new branch]      master -> master

And now push and pull to my heart’s content, as well as add and commit to my local repository.

Now I configure TimeMachine to not back up the Parallels virtual machine directory. It still gets backed up daily by SuperDuper, but they only files that I want to be able to recover versions of is the source code that I’m working on – and this technique serves me well for that.

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