Three years ago I bought a Macbook Pro for my own personal use. I envied OSX's BSD based core and seemingly fluid UI for quite a while. At the time I spent most of my time outside of my day job working on PHP projects and while PHP works well on windows I always had a disconnect when I inevitably uploaded my projects to a Linux based server.
Secondly while the notion of toying around with hardware, drivers, operating systems, debugging issues and keeping my machine clean of viruses, spyware and other nefarious applications was something I didn't mind and even secretly enjoyed in high school or college I seemed to have grown past those days. Every little configuration issue or accidental bad download on Windows cost me time I didn't care to spend anymore. I'm not nieve enough to think OSX is free of problems but the relativley tech savvy people I knew who had made the switch swore by it in terms of increased productivity.
It was for these reasons that one day I went on eBay, found a first generation Macbook Pro and took the plunge. Through the help of some friends I figured out how to adapt to the subtle differences between Windows and OSX and now three years later I'm on my second macbook pro and even switched my wife over to the platform a little over a year ago.
So, what is the point of all of this? Why am i recanting my love for all things Apple to you dear reader? Well this post is meant to serve as an introduction to a series of posts I intend on writing on what it's like to be a programmer, specifically a .NET programmer, who spends most of his time in OSX. I'm going to go over the tools I use (like why I chose VMWare Fusion over Parallels) some tricks I've picked up and anything else that comes to mind. First off thanks to John Miller for the idea for this series. I had a bit of writer's block this morning and he proposed I write it given his current situation of anxiously awaiting the release of the next round of macbook pros.
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