I use VMWare a lot. As we work on a cross-platform client to Team Foundation Server, I not only need to test our client on many operating systems, I also run Team Foundation Server in VMWare to talk to test our client against. Teamprise Explorer and the Eclipse plug-in use SWT for the UI Layer. This means that not only is performance great – the client takes on the native look and feel of the host operating system. However, you do need to test dialogs on those operating systems to make sure they all look ok and size correctly.
Yesterday, I was so busy looking over the Specs of the new Mac Pro that I nearly missed the announcement from VMWare that their Mac-Intel version is on its way. This means that we can get another one of those shiny Mac Book Pro’s and do a totally stand-alone demonstration of Teamprise talking to a (virtual) Team Foundation Server from Mac, Windows XP, Solaris and Linux all from one laptop. It will also be a boon for testing as nearly a third of the Teamprise development team work on Macs (both Intel based and PowerPC based G5’s)
Parallels has offered similar functionality on the Mac-Intel platform for a while, however now that VMWare are going to be offering virtualization on the Mac-Intel platform it means that we can re-use our library of VMWare formated virtual PC’s – which will save a lot of setup time. VMWare are one of those companies that don’t announce things publicly until they are well down the line and pretty solid, so I am hopeful that the beta will be available soon. If you are interested, you can pre-register for the beta here. Interestingly (and probably not that surprisingly) Microsoft have announced that they are shelving Virtual PC for the Mac and won’t be unleashing Mac-Intel support on to the public.
