Ask HN: Developing on windows stack with a non-windows OS

[vonadz]

We've recently acquired a company that uses windows for a lot of their development (C#, Visual Studio, Azure, etc). Most of us use mac or linux, which has caused some issues with trying to set up local dev environments for the windows dependent stack. I've tried finding open-source alternatives, but it ended up being easier to just install a windows vm locally and do development on that. Unfortunately, even with 12 cpus and 16 gb of RAM allocated for the VM, it's pretty slow and laggy.

Other than getting a windows dedicated machine, does anyone have any recommendations for good setups to develop on a windows-dependent stack on linux / mac?

[solardev]

You can get Windows cloud VMs to use as dev environments. We're basically back to the dumb terminal days, lol.

For your Macs, you can also try using Parallels with Windows ARM, which might be less laggy than emulating x86 in a VM. Many apps will then go through Microsoft's own x86 emulation layer inside Windows ARM. Sometimes that's faster? Worth a shot.

But nothing beats developing and testing on real Windows hardware. Doesn't that company have those machines already? You can run them as RDP servers (better than VNC) and just connect to them remotely.

And for your Linux machines, you can just dual boot into real Windows. They're still x86, aren't they?

Edit: Oh, and have you already tried WINE? That virtualizes system calls instead of emulating them. If it works, it should be much faster.

[vonadz]

Thanks for this! I considered doing Windows cloud VMs, but just seemed like a hassle.

I'll try out Windows ARM with Parallels.

In this case we didn't acquire their hardware.

Yeah dual booting was the solution I was hoping to avoid, mostly because it's inconvenient to transfer information between the two systems on one machine, but it seems that's the most viable solution.

I looked at WINE, but read that specifically Visual Studio doesn't work very well on it.