VirtualBox for Coding/Programming?

Hi, I'm a new Mac user. I've had it for exactly a semester. I'm a MIS major and use Visual Basic, Access and OneNote alot so I dislike Bootcamp due to some random error and glitches I get.

So, I'm wondering anyone with experience with VirtualBox by Sun is good/stable enough for coding/programming?

Compared to let's say....VMWare/Parallel?

Thanks.

Long Post...suck...

Best thing is to try it out. Windows is a pretty big resource hog though so running two OS's at the same time can get a bit slow. Just make sure that you have a lot of memory and you'll probably be fine. I haven't tried those apps myself in VirtualBox so I can't say for sure.

I've had very good experience with VirtualBox; it has yet to crash on me using Windows XP or Linux guests, though I haven't used those specific applications. When it comes down to it, though, your best bet will be to try it out as Murlyn said. Assuming you had a Windows license for use with Boot Camp, it will be an entirely free test, so you have nothing to lose. It will likely work for you, and VirtualBox is getting better with each release.

Yeah, just a hassle, thanks guys, any more inputs?

Just general coding/programming will do!

Hi, I'm a new Mac user. I've had it for exactly a semester. I'm a MIS major and use Visual Basic, Access and OneNote alot so I dislike Bootcamp due to some random error and glitches I get.

Click to expand...

Boot Camp is your best bet if you're a serious programmer and especially if you're running MS Access to any degree. VirtualBox is fine and like the reply stated is getting better with each release. However, compiling large Access data bases will be much faster when doing it via BC.

What kind of random error and glitches are you getting by running Windows from a Boot Camp partition? I run Windows 7 from Boot Camp without any problems and so do lots of other folks.

Regards.

Battery Icon stopped showing up, thank god it pops up warnings for low batteries.
The Bootcamp icon doesn't start up when booting into windows, even moved it into start-up folder manually.
When I select "Restart into Mac OSX" in the Bootcamp Icon Taskbar it goes back into XP sometimes.

When I close my lid it doesn't go to sleep/hibernate, it did it twice and died on me.

Other small stuff that just really frustrates me, I might delete the Bootcamp and do another one for Windows 7/Vista instead of XP.

I love VirtualBox...I paid for VMware Fusion and I don't use it because I lile VirtualBox better...I think you could use it for dev, but its just a guess.

Since I don't know what version of VS you're using, I'm going to use 2008 Professional for the basis of this post. As see here, the system requirements aren't extraordinarily high but combined with Access and OneNote, that could be a stretch in a VM. You really should be doing this through Boot Camp as chscag stated.

Boot Camp Schmoot Camp

Yeah I would vote for boot camp also since I ran virtualbox on friday running win 7 and if you dont' have a massive amount of RAM then you're going to be crawling.