Visual Studio 2022 installation in Parallels Desktop for Apple Silicon (M1) Mac

I am surprised with your comments since I am using M2, and the product I am working on is framework 4.7, and I have almost 107 projects in it

 

I was testing this setup for a month mainly using Blazor & .NET 6. The main issue I experienced with Visual Studio was that hot reload while debugging hardly ever worked (for clarity, this hot reload does work in native windows), so I had to stop and restart the app for every change. This one thing in it self led to so much wasted time and frustration that I decided it was not working for me. Of course it was not a decision made lightly as I have been using MacBook Pros for as long as I can remember and have always been very happy with the hardware. The other thing I experienced, which is a Parallels issue in general and not linked to VS, was that the keyboard setup was all over the place, and I could not find any reason or pattern to it's behavior. My Parallels was set up with two different languages that I could swap between. Sometimes this worked, sometimes not. So when one in the middle of coding can't find "\" or "@" and needs to randomly test out loads of key combinations, that is not in my working day acceptable. However, I would be pleased to hear your comments on my experience. Do you use hot reload and if so have you not experienced and issues?

 

Hey @BentM, thanks so much for the detailed feedback! I've asked our senior devs to take a look at the issue with hot reload while debugging. What version of Visual Studio are you running? As for the keyboard issue, what keyboard shortcut do you use to toggle between layouts?

 

Hi, and thanks for quick feedback. Great if you would look into the hot reload issue. I do however think it is an VS ARM issue rather than Parallels issue, but unfortunately the consequences as a user is still the same, but I look forward to hearing back from you. The version I used at the time was VS 17.6.4.

The keyboard issue though I do think is a Parallels issue. In native windows I use "Start" + space bar to get the list of available keyboards/language. In Parallels I have not found the correct keyboard shortcut, however that is not a big issue as I use the standard icon on the taskbar down in the right hand corner for choosing my setup. The issue is that despite having chosen the correct setup (so language and keyboard) the keyboard setup randomly seem to change. My selected setup is visible in the taskbar, so this does not change. It is just the mapping of the keys that change. I have experienced a whole day where it has worked fine all day. Next day again it is all over the place and I cannot find $, @, \, ' and other characters. It works fine one minute but not the next. One of my employees had exactly the same issues (also the hot reload issues).

 

Sorry, please see my response #24 below, as it did not got posted as a reply to your message.

 

Hey @BentM, no worries, I still get email notifications for updates on a watched thread. Sorry for not giving a quick turnaround this time.
Regarding the Hot Reload issue, do you run your Blazor app with the debugger enabled? I see this thread where disabling the debugger helped someone to get Hot Reload working (https://stackoverflow.com/a/70194222).

Regarding the key mapping issue, would you please take a screenshot of the keyboard layouts that you have in Windows and send it over?
It is an ongoing challenge for us to support all keyboard shortcuts with the Windows key, as we use the Command button to emulate the Windows button, but Command is the primary keyboard modifier on Mac, and many shortcuts with this key are low-level or default system shortcuts (e.g. Cmd+Space, Cmd+Tab). However, in your case, you can re-configure keyboard shortcuts in macOS to free Cmd+Space from opening the Spotlight - and then it will work in Windows as on a PC:


P.S. I personally use the Caps Lock key to toggle between keyboard layouts, I find it super convenient and recommend you try it. Just enable the respective option in macOS system settings (when enabled, use Cmd+Caps to toggle the uppercase lock):