Dropbox, ASP.Net, and a Mac

I recently switched to a Mac for my development platform, and have enjoyed the experience so far. Working with zsh and ruby and rails and all kinds of things have been much easier in OSX. Getting down with .Net is still done in Win7 for me, usually on my VM. (I haven’t booted into Windows for .Net development, yet, VMWare has done great.)

I set up my environment so that most everything is saved on the OSX partition, which isn’t a big deal because VMWare just shares folders over to Windows. So, all my files reside in one place. Nice and tidy. I have a Code directory set up to keep my code on one spot (genius on the naming of that directory, I thought). It’s shared over to Windows, and I can get to everything in either OS.

The downside to this plan is that to Windows it’s a network share. If you’ve ever fired up Visual Studio to do some ASP.Net development over a network share, you know it’s not a happy camper. But, I don’t want to duplicate everything for the sake of keeping Studio happy. If I do that for Visual Studio, then I’ll have to do it for everybody, and that’s a slippery slope I don’t want to go down.

A little Googling later, and I find somebody using Dropbox to keep it all synced up. I’m already a happy Dropbox customer, and had the, “Well, duh!” moment as soon as I read it. (If you’d like to become a happy Dropbox customer, get an extra 250 MB when you sign up with my invitation. They give me an extra 250 MB, too.)

Pretty easy to set up at that point. I installed Dropbox on the VM, created a folder in it for .Net development, and I was all ready to go. ASP.Net was happy because it was now on a local drive, I was happy because I could still move things in and out of git on the Mac side of things.

I can already hear some howling, “You’re duplicating your code! It’s stored twice on the same machine!” True…but I Dropbox does all the syncing for me, so it’s mostly an afterthought. The upside is that I can get to it with the tools I want in the OS I want whenever I want. Code it up in Studio, grep the VSS files out of it in zsh, commit branch and merge with git on the Mac, and debug away in Windows.

Even though the code files exist twice, the tools don’t. I don’t have git or a text editor installed on Windows because I can use the Mac ones.

Another big downside would be coding sans Internet connection. For the most part Dropbox syncs everything up so quickly I rarely notice it. But, if I’m away from an Internet connection, that’s not going to happen at all, and even though both copies are on the same machine, they’d be out of sync until I get hooked back up. For all practical purposes, this hasn’t been an issue, yet.

Overall, for having a little duplication on the hard drive and an extra layer of something-that-could-go-wrong in there, the experience has been, well, not noticeable. Everything just works, I haven’t had to wait on Dropbox to finish syncing files yet, and I get to use the right tool for the right job.

Five Days with My MacBook Pro

With a few changes headed my way in the coming new year, it was once again time to get some new hardware. I took the leap and opted for a MacBook Pro. (2.66GHz/4GB/320GB/15” so not the biggest, baddest one.) Here are a few of my initial leaving-Windows-and-Dell thoughts.

I can say after five days that I’m pretty sure I made the right move. There are a few things I’m struggling with in the switch, mainly my fingers going to the correct keys. Years of hitting CTRL on a windows keyboard has me hitting the fn key on the MBP, which doesn’t do much. Getting used to the Command key will take some time, but the oddest keyboard issue I’m having is hitting the B key. The reach is apparently shorter because I’ve put a lot of spaces where there should be a B.

On the flip side, it didn’t take me very long to get used to the multi-touch functions on the track pad. Having an iPhone doesn’t hurt, but the two, three, and four finger operations didn’t take long to become comfortable with. Scrolling through blog readers, articles, and Tweetdeck is a lot easier.

Installing applications is a lot easier, and a lot quicker than on Windows. To be fair, I haven’t installed a lot of huge apps, but the fairly large ones I did install went really quickly. The only real side-by-side comparison of installation I have is Tweetdeck, and it was a fraction of the time getting it up and running on the Mac. Most apps are just download, mount the image, drag to applications, unmount the image, and run it.

Now on to one of the bigger reasons I was after a Mac: Ruby on Rails development.

Rails on Windows was painfully slow at times. I tried all kinds of stuff to get my specs to run in less time than it took me to go downstairs and brew a cup of coffee. After copying the git repo of one of my sample apps over, I ran the specs and it reported .7-ish seconds. And it actually WAS .7-ish seconds. Not the 45 seconds of dead time at the command prompt while it fired up servers and stuff then reporting .7-ish seconds when it was done with the tests that I was used to. I’m already looking forward to doing some more of this.

Before I start sounding like a total fan boy, it hasn’t all been awesome. There was a 2 hour fight with an iso and some printer drivers to try and get my printer at home to work. Still haven’t got it to work, so I gave up and grabbed Brendan’s netbook to print off what I needed.

I’m also not enthralled with only having 1440 x 900 resolution. But, I’m getting old and my eyes would get tired staring at the hi-res Dell I had before, so maybe I should not worry about this one too much.

Also, couldn’t find any decent blog writer that lived up to Windows Live Writer, so this is being written in Live Writer in my Windows VM. (Bootcamp + VMWare Fusion + Win7 is freaking awesome. Looking forward to some .Net dev when I get Studio installed.)

Suffice it to say, the positives out weigh the negatives so far. I’m sandals-to-work away from swallowing the blue pill with the Apple logo on the side of it. :)