First experience Macbook Air as a Windows Development device

I had a little Phillips laptop for several years. It was light and had reasonable battery life. It had a dual core with four gigabytes of memory and a reasonably sized hard-disk and I took it everywhere with me.

A while ago I gave the little laptop away to my son and decided to get a new one. Well, I ummed and ahhed for a long time about what to do. Whether to get a really small one or a powerful beast. I also seriously began to consider whether to go for something like a Lenovo or to get an Apple laptop and re-program it with Windows. It was tough.

My professional life has changed drastically in the last year because I made a concious decision not to continue in the same big finance corporate world I had become used to for nearly a decade. I really wanted to go back to electronics, embedded systems, small interconnected and mobile gizmos; to return to my career roots if you will.

My interest in mobile phone programming has enabled me to touch on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. I have also taken up Arduino, PIC, Atmel and Gadgeteer programming as well as starting to do electronic and PCB design again. Apple only allows development for their hardware to be done on a Mac. I accepted this and bought a Mac Mini a couple of years ago but I can do most everything else with a PC.

I have however become impressed with Apple hardware. My iPhone and iPad are constant companions and the iPad delayed my desire to buy a laptop for more than six months because I really didn't need one when I had the iPad around. So, i bit the bullet, or should that be the apple?, and bought a Macbook Air. When it arrived, rather than setting it up in dual boot mode I decided to run a Windows 7 install in a virtual machine and retained the OSX-Lion on the real machine. In the last week I've had a chance to test it out and I'm pleasantly surprised that it all works fine.

I have VirtualBox running a Windows 7 install, Visual Studio on that. Then I have XCode on OSX but most importantly, Mono, MonoToch, MonoDroid and all the tools that let me write code in C# on non MS platforms with the framework APIs I am used to. I can even write on Visual Studio and copy directly to Mono and test on another platform.