What is the best VM for developing WPF apps from within OS X?
- by MarqueIV
All of my machines are Macs (Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini (and Apple TV 2.0 too! :) ) but for my day-job, I develop .NET/WPF applications. Normally I just boot into Boot Camp and develop that way, which of course works great, but there are times when I need to simultaneously get to things on my Mac-side of the equation, so I've bought both VMware 3.1 and Parallels 6. Both work, however, even on my Mac Pro where I paid to upgrade to the better video cards (the NVidia 8600s I think vs. the stock ATI cards) the WPF performance bites!!
Now this confuses me since both boast that they support not only hardware-accelerated OpenGL 2.1, but also hardware-accelerated DirectX 9 (VMware even allegedly supports DirectX 10!) via their respective virtual drivers and both can run 3D games just fine, even in a window. But even the simple act of resizing a WPF window that has a tiled background results in some HIDEOUS repainting and resizing behaviors. It's damn near closer to what you'd expect over RDP let alone a software-only renderer (forget accelerated hardware completely!)
So... can anyone please tell me WTF WPF is doing differently? More importantly, how can I speed up the WPF performance? Should I switch to VirtualBox that also has support for DirectX? Or am I just gonna have to 'byte' the bullet (sorry... had to. So I like puns! Thank Jon Stewart!) and continue using Boot Camp?
