Parallels lets you run many different types of operating systems on your Mac. Because the developers knew that most Mac users will want to install at least a Windows OS, Parallels includes a Windows Express installation option that eliminates the need to babysit a Windows XP or Vista installation.

• Parallels For Mac Support
• How To Repair Parallels Virtual Machine
• Parallels For Mac Review
• Parallels For Mac Activation Key

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This guide will take you through the Windows Express installation, which creates a virtual machine on your Mac. We'll stop short of actually installing Windows, because the specific steps depend on whether you're installing Windows XP, Vista, Win 7, or Win 8.

What You Will Need

• Parallels Desktop for Mac v3.0 or later.
• The installation CDs for Windows XP or Vista.
• 20 GB free disk space. You can get by with less (I've performed an installation with as little as 8 GB of available disk space), but you'll appreciate the extra room if you later want to install more Windows applications or store larger Windows files than you originally intended.
• About an hour of free time, for the Windows Express setup and to actually install Windows.

The Parallels OS Installation Assistant

By default, Parallels uses the Windows Express installation option. This option creates a virtual machine with settings that will work just fine for most individuals. You can always customize the virtual machine parameters later if you need to.

The real advantage of Windows Express is that it's fast and easy; it does most of the work for you. It will collect most of the information that Windows needs by asking you some questions. Once you supply the answers, you can leave and then return to a fully installed version of Windows. This is a much more pleasant Windows installation than the standard. The downside is that the Windows Express method doesn't let you directly configure many settings, including type of network, memory, disk space, and other parameters, although you can always tweak these and other settings later.

Using the OS Installation Assistant

1. Launch Parallels, usually located at /Applications/Parallels.
2. Click the ‘New’ button in the Select a Virtual Machine window.
3. Select the installation mode that you want Parallels to use.
   
   • Windows Express (recommended)
   • Typical
   • Custom
4. For this installation, select the Windows Express option and click the ‘Next’ button.

Configuring a Virtual Machine for Windows

Parallels needs to know which operating system you plan to install, so it can set the virtual machine parameters and collect the information necessary to automate the installation process.

Configure the Virtual Machine for Windows

1. Select the OS type by clicking the dropdown menu and choosing Windows from the list.
2. Select the OS version by clicking the dropdown menu and choosing Windows XP or Vista from the list.
3. Click the ‘Next’ button.

Entering Your Windows Product Key and Other Configuration Information

The Parallels Windows Express installation option is ready to collect some of the information it needs to automate the installation process.

Product Key, Name, and Organization

1. Enter your Windows product key, which is usually located on the back of the Windows CD case or inside the Windows envelope. The dashes in the product key are entered automatically, so just enter the alphanumeric characters. Be careful not to lose the product key, because you may need it in the future if you need to reinstall Windows.
2. Enter your name by using the alphanumeric keys and the space key. Do not use any special characters, including apostrophes.
3. Enter your organization's name, if appropriate. This field is optional.
4. Click the ‘Next’ button.

Name That Virtual Machine

It's time to specify a name for the virtual machine that Parallels is about to create. You can choose any name you like, but a descriptive name is usually best, particularly if you have multiple hard drives or partitions.

In addition to naming the virtual machine, you will also choose whether your Mac and the new Windows virtual machine should be able to share files.

Pick a Name and Make a Decision About Sharing Files

1. Enter a name for Parallels to use for this virtual machine.
2. Enable file sharing, if desired, by placing a check mark next to the 'Enable file sharing' option. This will let you share files in your Mac's home folder with your Windows virtual machine.
3. Enable user profile sharing, if desired, by placing a check mark next to the ‘Enable user profile sharing’ option. Enabling this option allows the Windows virtual machine to access the files on your Mac desktop and in your Mac user folder. It's best to leave this file unchecked and manually create shared folders later on. This provides more protection for your files​ and lets you make file sharing decisions on a folder-by-folder basis.​
4. Click the ‘Next’ button.

Performance: Should Windows or OS X Get Top Billing?

At this point in the configuration process, you can decide whether to optimize the virtual machine you're about to create for speed and performance or allow applications to have dibs on your Mac's processor.

Decide How to Optimize Performance

1. Select an optimization method.
   • Virtual Machine. Choose this option for the best performance of the Windows virtual machine you're about to create.
   • Mac OS X applications. Choose this option if you prefer your Mac applications to take precedence over Windows.
2. Make your selection. I prefer the first option, to give the virtual machine the best performance possible, but the choice is yours. You can change your mind later if you decide that you made the wrong choice.
3. Click the ‘Next’ button.

Start the Windows Installation

All of the options for the virtual machine have been configured, and you've supplied your Windows product key and your name, so you're ready to install Windows. I'll tell you how to start the Windows installation process below, and cover the rest of the process in another step-by-step guide.

Begin the Windows Installation

1. Insert the Windows Install CD into your Mac's optical drive.
2. Click the ‘Finish’ button.

Parallels will start the installation process by opening the new virtual machine you created, and booting it from the Windows Install CD. Follow the onscreen instructions to install Windows.

As a .NET developer, I’ve spent most of my time coding on Windows machines. It’s only logical: Visual Studio is the richest development experience for building C# and VB.NET applications, and it only runs on Windows…right?

When I joined Stormpath to work on our open-source .NET authentication library, I was handed a MacBook Pro and given an interesting challenge: can a Mac be an awesome .NET development platform?

To my surprise, the answer is yes! I’ll share how I turned a MacBook Pro into the ultimate Visual Studio development machine.

How to Run Visual Studio on a Mac

Visual Studio doesn’t run natively on OS X, so my first step was to get Windows running on my MacBook Pro. (If you want an editor that does run natively, Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio Code might fit the bill).

There are multiple options for running Windows on a Mac. Every Mac comes with Apple’s Boot Camp software, which helps you install Windows into a separate partition. To switch between OSes, you need to restart.

Parallels is a different animal: it runs Windows (or another guest OS) inside a virtual machine. This is convenient because you don’t have to restart your computer to switch over to Windows. Instead, Windows runs in an OS X application window.

I found that a combination of both worked best for me. I installed Windows into a Boot Camp partition first, and then turned that partition into an active Parallels virtual machine. This way, I have the option of using Windows in the virtual machine, or restarting to run Windows natively at full speed.

I was initially skeptical of the performance of a heavy application like Visual Studio running in a virtual machine. The option to restart to Windows via Boot Camp gave me a fallback in case Visual Studio was sluggish.

There are some minor disadvantages to this method: you can’t pause the virtual machine or save it to a snapshot. A non-Boot Camp virtual machine doesn’t have these limitations. This guide will work regardless of what type of virtual machine you create.

After three months of serious use, and some tweaks, I’ve been very impressed with Parallels’ performance. I haven’t needed to boot directly to Windows at all. (For comparison, my host machine is a 15” mid-2015 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB flash drive.)

In the remainder of this guide, I’ll detail the steps I took to optimize both Parallels and Visual Studio to run at peak performance.

Installing Windows With Boot Camp and Parallels

Parallels For Mac Support

This part’s easy. I followed Apple’s Boot Camp guide to install Windows in a separate partition.

Then, I installed Parallels and followed the Parallels Boot Camp guide to create a new virtual machine from the existing Boot Camp partition.

Tweaking Parallels for Performance and Usability

The Parallels team publishes guidelines on how to maximize the performance of your virtual machine. Here’s what I adopted:

Virtual machine settings:

• 2 virtual CPUs
• 4096MB system memory
• 256MB graphics memory

Parallels options:

• Optimization: Faster virtual machine, Adaptive hypervisor, Tune Windows for speed all turned on.
• Sharing: Shared cloud, SmartMount, and Access Windows folders from Mac turned off, as I didn’t need these for my workflow.

I experimented with both of Parallels’ presentation modes, Coherence and Full Screen. While it was cool to see my Windows apps side-by-side with OS X in Coherence mode, I found that the UI responsiveness (especially opening and closing windows and dialogs) felt sluggish.

Because of this, I use Full Screen exclusively now. I have Windows full-screen on my external Thunderbolt display, and OS X on my laptop. If I need to use OS X on my large monitor, I can swipe the Magic Mouse to switch desktops.

Adjusting OS X and Windows Features

I fixed a few annoyances and performance drains right off the bat:

• Function keys. If you’re using the Mac keyboard, you’ll want to change the function key behavior so the F1-F12 keys work correctly in Visual Studio. From System Preferences – Keyboard, make sure Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys is checked. With this turned on, hold Fn to use the Mac functions (brightness, volume, etc.) on F1-F12. With an external non-Mac keyboard, this isn’t an issue.

• Start menu. I’m using Windows 8, and the removal of the Start menu annoyed me. I clung to my old ways and installed Start8 to restore it.

• Disable Windows visual effects. I turned off most of the Windows desktop manager visual effects by going to Control Panel – System and Security – Advanced system settings – Advanced – Performance – Settings – Visual Effects and choosing Adjust for best performance. However, I left Smooth edges of screen fonts checked because it improves text rendering on my monitor.

Installing Visual Studio and Helpful Extensions

Installing Visual Studio is a piece of cake once the virtual machine is set up. I simply downloaded the latest release from MSDN and let the installer run.

If you use an Apple Magic Mouse (as I do), Visual Studio tends to be overly eager to zoom the text size in and out as you swipe your finger over the mouse. The Disable Mouse Wheel Zoom add-on fixes this annoyance.

Improving Visual Studio for Performance

I was impressed with how well Visual Studio performed under emulation. With a large multi-project solution open, though, I saw some slowdowns.

Through trial and error, I found a number of things that could be disabled to improve performance. You may not want to make all of the changes I did, so pick and choose your own list of tweaks:

• Disable hardware-accelerated rendering. Unchecking Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance, Enable rich client visual experience, and Use hardware graphics acceleration if available via Options – Environment made the UI feel much more responsive on my machine.

• Start up to an empty environment. Starting up Visual Studio for the first time feels a lot snappier if you skip the default news page on startup. Select Empty environment under Options – Environment – Startup – At startup.

• Remove unused extensions. Visual Studio ships with a number of extensions that you may not need. From Tools – Extensions and Updates – Installed, remove any extensions you aren’t actively using (you can always reinstall them later). I got rid of six extensions I didn’t need.

• Disable extra debugging features. I turned off both Enable Diagnostic Tools while debugging and Show elapsed time PerfTip while debugging in Options – Debugging – General. I wasn’t using these debugging features, and debugging felt snappier after I disabled them.

• Turn off the Navigation Bar. I found the code editor Navigation Bar to be unnecessary if the Solution Explorer is open. I disabled it via Options – Text Editor – All Languages – Navigation Bar.

• Disable CodeLens. CodeLens is a cool feature for collaboration, but it’s not part of my current workflow. I got rid of the CPU overhead by turning it off via Options – Text Editor – All
  Languages – CodeLens – Enable CodeLens.

• Turn off Track Changes. When a file is open in the code editor, Visual Studio will represent recent changes by displaying small regions of green or yellow on the scroll bar. If you can live without this, turn off Track changes via Options – Text Editor – General for a small performance boost.

• Turn off Track Active Item. Squeeze out a little bit more UI performance out by ensuring Track Active Item in Solution Explorer is unchecked under Options – Projects and Solutions – General.

How To Repair Parallels Virtual Machine

Visual Studio on a Mac: The Best of Both Worlds

With these tweaks, I’ve come to love using Visual Studio on a Mac. The performance is good, and by running Windows in a virtual machine, I get the best of both OS worlds.

Parallels For Mac Review

Want to see what I’m building with this setup? Check out our open-source .NET SDK on Github.

Parallels For Mac Activation Key

Do you have any other tricks you’ve used to improve Visual Studio performance? Any must-have add-ons that boost your productivity? Leave me a comment below!