Recently Jon switched to developing on macOS, and Rob’s been developing on Windows. It’s time for the Freaky Friday edition! The guys compare notes, what they like, what’s confusing, and what they’ve learned.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 241: The Freaky Friday macOS / Windows Switch

Transcript:

 Kevin: [00:00:08 ] Hello and welcome to Herding Code. This episode is being recorded on eight April, April 3rd. Is that right? 2028 or is it still March? I feel like it’s still March.

Rob: [00:00:19 ] Kevin. That was smooth, man. You should do this for a living.

Kevin: [00:00:24 ] And I am joined today by, smart ass, Rob Conery and, and Jon Galloway.

Jon: [00:00:30 ] Hello.

Kevin: [00:00:31 ] Okay. And we are here today to talk about, transitioning between Mac and Windows. Jon recently made a, a life change and, is doing more work on the Mac side and Rob has, recently transitioned over, do more Windows stuff.

So we thought it’d be fun to talk about how those switches went. Jon wanted, why don’t you, sorry, go ahead.

Jon: [00:00:51 ] we’re calling this, this is the freaky Friday edition.

Kevin: [00:00:54 ] right. Rob and Jon have switched over.

Jon: [00:00:56 ] Over. On a Friday. Yes. Yup. Yeah. So I recently switched to , I’m working, I’m working with the VS for Mac team. I’m kinda like, I’m like, so it’s a little bit less, I don’t know. So my, my role really is just like dotnet dev on a Mac. So, but you know, mostly looking at, Visual Studio for Mac. Yeah. So that’s been fun. I’ve been doing most of my dev work on, on Mac for the past several months, and, and, yeah.

Kevin: [00:01:25 ] So for people who don’t know, like what is, what is Visual Studio for Mac, like what, what’s the kind of the backstory there.

Jon: [00:01:33 ] Yeah. Well, so this is confusing, right? So there is Visual Studio for Windows that’s been around since it was, I dunno, Interdev or whatever. They’ll, you know what I mean? It’s like early, late nineties, early two thousands, whatever. It’s been around quite a long time. Then, there was. There was Mono, there was Mono Develop, and then Mono became Xamarin and they had Xamarin studio and it was really focused on building Xamarin products.

And then with the acquisition of, of Xamarin by Microsoft, and then they’ve kind of productized it into Visual Studio and some of the, you know, like over time. Mono develop Mono is change. Like, so originally it was this cross platform, it was all GTK. It was,

There’s some tradeoffs to doing that, you know, like in being fully open source cross platform thing too.

Like there’s not the same kind of quality stability kind of things that you can get out of Visual Studio for Windows. So that’s been a lot of the focus. And then the other. Visual studio is Visual Studio Code. And that confuses people. Like, cause we’ve done things where we’ll do like a customer interview and it’s like, okay, we’re talking to a team that works on Visual Studio for Mac.

And then we’ll talk to them. And they’re like, yeah, I’m on my Mac using Visual Studio Code and you know, and we’re like, Oh, okay. Well, so, you know, and that’s partly our fault. Like branding and naming is hard. but the idea is Visual Studio Code is like a lightweight editor. You know, it’s quick startup.

It doesn’t, it doesn’t have a whole lot of bells and whistles. which is fine for a lot of people that just want to type code and that code really fast. And then there are a bunch of extensions for it. And it’s cross platform and open source. And then the idea is, you know, Visual Studio for Windows and Visual Studio for Mac.

The idea is more of a. Integrated developer environment. So something where you’re, you know, you’re going to have more like project templates and scaffolding built in and, and you know, more debuggers and analyzers and, and, that kind of stuff. So, so that’s kinda, you know, the difference between the two.

Kevin: [00:03:43 ] Okay. So. Why don’t you give us like the quick, you know, like what was the initial transition to being a, a, a real Mac user like for you? Like what were the, what were the, what was the pain points? What was frustrating?

What’d you love.

Rob: [00:03:59 ] It was. It was joyous to watch this go down on Twitter, I have to say.

Jon: [00:04:04 ] Okay. Well, so let me give him my full Apple back story. I learned to, I learned to program on an Apple ][ in high school for summary. We had somebody that was a previous Apple exec. Like was part of the board of my school or whatever. And so we had all these Macs. So I was actually like the high school Mac geek and I was, I was doing all this, like I was way into HyperCard and I just loved all the Mac stuff.

And then over time I went to college, I’m like, what’s this Windows crap where you have to do Windows? And so whatever. I learned some Windows and you know, over time it’s, it’s, I’ve had like two brains to it because. There’s undeniably like Apple hardware and most software is like the fit and finish is just beautiful and it all just works really well.

And there’s all, it’s like just this one kind of. There’s only, you know, one of them. So like they, they test it and make sure it’s perfect and it works. And then Windows is kinda, yeah, it’s been different. There’s, you know, registries and I don’t know, there’s all kinds of stuff, but I got used to it. Right.

So, and then kind of more recently I was looking at my Twitter history cause I was asking stuff about Homebrew and I was like, you know, I was, I would say at Microsoft when .NET Core first was becoming a thing. It was first K project K, and then it was DNX, and then it was, .NET Core, and now it’s going back to just .NET.

but anyhow, that part of the thing with that was it was cross platform. And so I, I, for a while traveled with two laptops everywhere. You know, I had a Windows laptop and a Mac book air, and I would, you know, pop it out and say like, here’s my quick little demo, see it runs.NET core. And then I would put the laptop back away and go back to Windows.

You know, I mean, we really like, it was air quotes worked on Mac, but it didn’t, I don’t know. We didn’t really do much with it, you know, we just made sure it compiled and ran, but there was no like IDE for it or editor. And there wasn’t much that you could really. You know, w the most, I would say most of Microsoft presenters when they said it runs on Mac, that’s about all they do is like, okay, we’re done.

Rob: [00:06:19 ] yeah, the punchline, the forever punchline.

Jon: [00:06:22 ] Right. And runs on a Mac. I did have one experience with that though. I was in Moscow speaking at a conference. I was actually doing a, I had like a little five minute, five or 10 minute thing in a keynote at a conference here, and I had my Windows machine and my Mac. And I spilled coffee. I was like sitting in my hotel room.

I’m like, I am so ready for this. I’ve got all these demos ready and everything. I spilled coffee on my Windows machine. And it got into the keyboard and like I could very quickly like turned it upside down, put towels on and everything, and I’m like, okay, it’s working fine, it’s working fine. Going through, I start typing and I’m like, huh, the letter N isn’t actually responding on my keyboard.

And then slowly like there is liquid inside the keyboard. It’s like slowly like other keys stop working, you know? And I am in full panic mode. Cause I actually had a tech check that afternoon in the keynote the next day and I’m in Moscow. Like, I don’t know what to do, you know, and then I’m like, wait a minute, I bet I could do most of these demos on the Mac.

And then I, I, I was like, wait a minute, this is an Azure demo. I can do this. I can, I can totally spin it. This is Docker. I can do that, you know? And I was like, I can do this entire thing on Mac. So. Yeah. So that was that. so anyhow, more recently, I,

Kevin: [00:07:44 ] Jon Jon, do you realize that it was your subconscious that made you spill that coffee? Right? It was.

Jon: [00:07:51 ] you should have seen the panic though. I was like, Oh, no, what are we gonna do? So, yeah, so I, I got this MacBook in September and I did the standard stuff. I’ve always done like I, so the first one I got was a loner and it was previously an intern had it. And I went through and did all the, you know, I got my old scripts, my, my Homebrew, and I did all my stuff and I just, you know, and then,

and then I got the real nice one in January.

And that was actually where Rob and I st