First of all, love the site, love the blog.

I just wrote about how I am considering the Mac just to force myself out of .NET.

Will the Mac give me that warm fuzzy feeling that the guy on the commercials promises me?

Will I miss Visual Studio?

What should I look out for? Is a 13” MacBook enough to do some serious development and keep it lightweight so I can keep it with me. I think keeping it light will help me adopt the new platform.

I can’t tell you what the experience will be for you… but for me, switching to Mac was the best decision I’ve ever made. Honestly, It took me about 2 months to get used to the idiosyncrasies of OS X. I think that was less about OS X itself and more about me getting out of the way Windows “taught” me to think and work over the years.

You will miss Visual Studio. At first. Especially Intellisense. But I’ve found that not having Intellisense makes me a better developer. If you’re anything like me, you’ll see what I mean. Really.

I own the Biggest Thing That Could Possibly Work (the 17” Macbook Pro), but the Macbook works fine for most people.

Good luck!

I bought my first mac a couple months ago, a 13” white MacBook. I had a hard time deciding between the 13” MacBook and the 15” MacBook Pro. For my situation, I decided that having the smaller screen meant slightly longer battery life, and less heat output. The MacBook still gets too hot for my lap after about 20 minutes, but the MacBook Pro would have set my pants on fire. (After buying it, I thought, or I could just put it on the table… hmmm…)

The main drawback to the 13” is less UI real estate, but I like have a “clean” desktop and only a couple of windows open at any one time, so it’s been fine for me (also, unlike Windows, the Mac encourages you to “hide” windows instead of “minimizing” them, and you get to them via alt-tab).

I would agree with Brian… You’ll initially miss Visual Studio. But get TextMate, spend a few minutes learning the command-line, and pretty soon you’ll never want to go back to Visual Studio anyway. :-)

Just follow up, I went for the black 13” mac book and I love it.

Oh and for those moments of Visual Studio weakness – get parallels – and I can tell you it runs Vista faster than any of my work colleagues Dell laptops ;-)

Thanks for the information.

I can work my way around a command line, I actually started developing way back in college on Slackware Linux using vi.

Not that I want to go back to exclusive command-line oriented computing, but I am excited to get back into a bash-ish prompt.. Always makes you feel cool to whip things up that way.

I think I am going to take the plunge - now I am trying to decide - should I buy the black MacBook (will match nicely with my Thinkpad), or a MacBook Pro…

I purchased a MacBook Pro a while back and have been very happy with the decision. I’m still primarily a .NET developer so I’ve been making a lot of use of Parallels, and prior to that BootCamp. Overall I’ve actually been pretty dissatisfied with Parallels and am currently evaluating VMWare’s Fusion

A few of my co-workers (who are all .NET devs) have recently taken the plunge with the 13” MacBook and have been pleased.

Oh one more thing that may or may not help, Ed, is the difference between the keyboards of the MacBook and the Pro (there’s no ‘delete’ key on the macbook, just a backspace; I can do Fn-backspace to imitate delete when I need to). I ended up going into an Apple store and typing on both, just to see if I liked one better than the other.

There’s no PC-style “delete” key on the Pro either. It’s labeled “delete” but does what we (former) PC users would call backspace. Have to fn-delete in order to do a “delete”. Yeah, I’m confused too.

Ah yes, Brian’s right – I was thinking of the iMac keyboard I use at work.

The keyboard and mouse are actually my major pain points right now with the switch.

I tried out some coworkers iBook and MacBook (black edition—very slick).

Two cringey things for me, someone who wrote his first program in LOGO on an Apple ][ in the early 80’s:

1. I couldn’t figure out how to do the equivalent of alt-tab switching between windows in the same application. In other words I was in the mac browser and it popped a new window open. Alt-tab would keep switching me to another app, but not the other window. I learned F10 would bring up the other window but I had to hit another key to select it (right/left arrow). This could prove pretty annoying because I like to rock the keyboard.

1. Right mouse button. Right mouse button. Right mouse button… I know, I know, “I’ll get used to it” “Plug in an external mouse” “Use the 4h club key” ... But I abuse my right-mouse button on my thinkpad. I’ll just have to get over it.

idisposable

Ed,

Good luck on the switch…as a devoted pc guy who made the switch 6 months ago, I don’t even notice the differences anymore. Here’s some things that I found to help:

• Witch – a nice little free program that lets you press a shortcut (I use Option-Tab) rather that Command-Tab. The main benefit is that it will show you the different windows of each application rather than just the different applications.

• QuickSilver – this application has made me despise the Start Menu in Windows. Pressing a shortcut and then typing the name of the app that I want to use is SOOOOO much nicer (to me). After using this app for a couple of months I dare you to try using a Windows machine again. You will curse the Start Menu. Of course, there are some nice launchers for Windows as well but none of them come close to this.

As for the right-click, I’m amazed how much I don’t care about it after having my macbook pro for 6 months now. I now find it weird to use a right-mouse button when I use a pc.

Good luck on the switch!

thanks for the tip. I am going to order a macbook (pro probably) this week. I am sure i’ll be back for more help! thanks everyone…

@ed: command + tilde = switch “windows” in same program.

http://flickr.com/photos/jufemaiz/517739637/ <—that’s my rig. All running on the 13” MacBook, so combined with the rest of the peripherals I get the best of both worlds.

I switched to a mac three years back when it would have cost me twice what my 1GHz PPC iBook (12”) cost to get the equivalent PC option (Sony VAIO 12”) and I’ve never looked back :D

also, the more I’m exposed to ASP.NET the more I think Microsoft doesn’t understand the Web at all. Web Apps are not desktop apps through a new “tunnel”. They’re a different beast, which requires control at levels ignored at desktop app development level.

@joel – I think you’re mistaken. Microsoft understands the web very well. They’d have to in order to abstract it so effectively! :)

They also understand their typical client market very well. ASP.Net is exactly what most of their developers want. Most of these developers have zero experience with any other web development platform so they don’t chafe against the rough spots like other developers. For these developers (and there are a lot of them), ASP.Net offers a powerful platform that doesn’t take much to learn.

And, of course, there are lots of great ASP.Net developers out there that are trying to bend the framework to be more accommodating to “real” web development. These developers understand that there are other framework options available but for various reasons (often financial) they stick with .Net.

If your local job market is anything like mine, you can at least take solace in the fact that you’ll probably make more money contracting in .Net than you will in Rails. Of course, as all of us switchers know, you’ll definitely have less fun. :)