I think I'm over the hump on switching over to the MacBook Pro as my main development machine. I'm very happy with the whole setup. Most of my time was spent getting XP running and working the way I wanted it to. Hopefully there's some tidbits and insight in here that can help someone out one day. There are some things I still haven't totally figured out, so maybe some of you kind souls can return the favor. (In other words, this is all a thinly veiled whimper for help).

My big current job requires that I use Perforce over VPN. Surprisingly, the VPN provider has an OS X native client and there's a P4V Perforce client for OS X. Even more suprisingly, they work really well. Really then, all I need Windows for at the moment is running Visual Studio and IE for my Quickbooks Online (stupid ActiveX controls).

Boot Camp, VMWare, and You
VMWare Fusion totally rocks. It's this little $60 (after rebate) gem that makes this whole switch possible for me. So far I have had no problems, performance or otherwise, running Visual Studio. With the Unity feature, I'm not confined to a single window like you'd expect. I literally have Visual Studio and IE running in free floating windows on my OS X desktop.

But I wasn't comfortable with only having Windows as a virtual machine. I wanted to be able to dual boot directly into Windows if necessary. Booting directly into Windows is no different than running a (really nice) Windows laptop. There's 2 bits of good news about this: 1) Apple provides Boot Camp which makes it really easy to set up a partition on your drive for Windows and 2) VMWare will recognize a Boot Camp partition and will "virtualize" it for you in OS X. It really is the best of both worlds with a few minor drawbacks and gotchas:

- You can't "suspend" and "resume" the Boot Camp VM in Fusion like you can normally. This just means you have to fully shutdown and start up Windows if you ever need to Quit the VMWare application. This is all done within Fusion and happens relatively quickly.

- You can't have a partition bigger than 32GB. Technically, you can. But it has to be NTFS formatted and then OS X supposedly can't actually write to the partition. ALWAYS use FAT32 partitions. I know, I know... in Windows land we were always taught that NTFS == good. Forget that. Just go ahead an hit that "32GB" button in the Boot Camp assistant. Because I can tell you from experience that resizing the Boot Camp parition after the fact is no fun. It basically involves making a new Boot Camp parition, installing Windows, and then restoring your original Windows install. But it's tedious, and at best, risky. I found it easiest to just re-do the process from scratch.

- When the VM is running, the Boot Camp parition isn't available to OS X. It literally unmounts until you stop the VM. But the VM can see/write to the OS X partition. The VM can also take over other hardware devices (Network, CD, USB, iSight, etc.) but fortunately you can mount/unmount these devices while the VM is running. Say you're using a firewire external drive, you could easily have Windows XP or OS X use it by unmounting/mounting it without shutting down the VM.

- You can't use the Apple provided Windows drivers. When you set up Boot Camp, Apple will tell you to install their optimized drivers after Windows is installed. DON'T DO IT. VMWare provides it's own set of drivers it will inject after you virtualize the first time. The Apple drivers (the hard drive one, specifically) makes the Fusion runtime wig out and you'll get a BSOD if you try to virtualize it.

Playing Nice With Others
I played around with networking OS X and Windows machines for a bit back in the 803 days. I think ultimately the trick turned out to be to use static IP's. That was a couple of years ago and things seem like they've gotten worse with Leopard and Vista combined. The old "make sure the workgroup is all the same" trick no longer seems to work. Since my main computer was always the one that handled the printer and file sharing, I was trying to re-create that in OS X.

Along that same line, I really wanted to share files to my Xbox 360 from my Mac. Connect360 got such glowing reviews, I bought it on the spot. I shouldn't have because they offer a free trial and it doesn't seem to work on Leopard. Since I paid for it already, I'm awaiting my technical support email to be replied to before getting a refund. I think it has to do with OS X's firewalling.

Which brings me to another point just use the Leopard "specific services" firewall. Once again, in Windows land, we usually just turn off the Windows Firewall. But you really should have a software firewall if you're using a laptop at Wi-Fi spots. The OS X firewall is as good as any for managing your exposure (unless you're really handy with shell scripts and ipfw) and will ask you any time a new process wants to send/receive and will save your granted permissions accordingly.

In the interest of time and necessity, I've pretty much given up on file, media, and printer sharing. I'll probably winding buying a wireless print server of some sort and I guess I'll keep my XP laptop around as a primitive file server. I still don't have a way of copying files from the MacBook to the file server just yet. The only external device that I was worried about was my Blackberry Curve. It turns out RIM provides a nice little synching application that I actually like better than the Windows based Blackberry Desktop Manager.

Overall Impressions So Far
I love it. I don't have a basis for comparison, but I think the 4GB of RAM was well worth the small additional cost. Even with all my thrashing of creating/deleting/copying/installing/uninstalling, the machine seems like it has actually become more streamlined and stable. I haven't had a crash (yet).

I noticed that when the hardware is really working hard to the point of the fans kicking in, it gets super hot in spots on the case. I'm sure this is exacerbated by the aluminum shell. It concerned me at first until I realized under the course of normal computing, everything runs very quiet and at a reasonable temperature. The kick ass BookEndz dock I bought is made of a solid steel plate that elevates the rear of the MacBook about 1 inch. I'm not concerned with overheating.

I have the MacBook elevated on a stand and running through my IOGear KVMP switch. This allows me to use my HP 19" LCD as either a TV for the Xbox or a second monitor for the laptops. It also switches sound to the Logitech speakers I have. The only bummer is I'm currently using a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse. I got spoiled on the backlit keys of the MacBook Pro. I'd love to find a nice mouse/keyboard combo that is backlit and works well with Windows or OS X.

Unforunately, I haven't yet had the opportunity to do very much Mac-like activities. I've started up iMovie and GarageBand just for giggles. I installed the latest Xcode and briefly browsed the docs. But there will be plenty of time for that later. For now, I've got to get back to work!