I put up a pretty detailed overview of my experiences doing .NET development w/ Parallels on my blog: http://blog.1530technologies.com/2006/08/visual_studione.html Comments? - Griffin
Nice article. Hopefully others will read it and see how useful parallels can be. I am also a .NET developer and run most of the tools you do. Thankfully I use C# and not VB and I run into no problems with VS2005. I also use the compact framework and all the mobile device emulators within Parallels. It runs them snappier than when I used to develop on my 2.8ghz P4. I'm only using a MacBook(compared to a MBP) but other than the graphics they're pretty much identical. About the ram usage- I have 2gb ram, split down the middle. Parallels gets 1gb and I put the 924 or whatever Parallels suggested for XP. I'm generally running Photoshop and Illustrator(Rosetta), Adium, Colloquy, iTunes and Firefox in OS X and SQL Server & Enterprise Manager, Outlook 2007 Beta, IE and VS 2005 in Parallels. I don't really have any speed/memory issues on either side. Perhaps the MS Office in Rosetta was causing your slowness in OS X(Office was always slow..even on my G4 1.5ghz PowerBook).
Yeah, I am almost positive that it had to do with Office 2004 for the Mac. Entourage is really a memory hog, but i use it for everything.
I was using Entourage, but found that an email with an animated signature would make it use an entire processor core even while in the background. I ditched that trash and am using Apple Mail with the Exchange server now. It works just as well, plus can search messages MUCH faster, and it doesn't bog down the whole machine when displaying certain messages. I hope Apple adds a decent spreadsheet to iWork soon. When that happens, all of Microsoft Office will become irrelevant.
Project Center in Entourage is invaluable to me. Unless Apple can come up with an alternative, i'm sticking with it.
