Those of us invested in Apple's ecosystem love our iPhones, iPads and MacBooks. We trust 's intensive review process, which makes it easy to embrace the new and innovative. But when it comes to the business world, 's tools and operating systems tend to have the edge. Both small and large organizations invest heavily in Microsoft products. Take, for example, which has seen years of tuning and refining. Visual Studio is often used by developers -- even those of us who swear by Apple's ecosystem.
It works quite well, actually; the Unity feature allows you to treat Visual Studio in its own Mac window. However, you will need a current version of OS X (10.5.x), a LOT of RAM (more than 4GB), and a lot of hard drive space, as you will need to install all of Windows in your VM. Visual Studio for Mac will be based on Xamarin Studio, which is a popular C# IDE for OS X. Earlier this year, Microsoft acquired Xamarin in a deal believed to be worth between $400 and $500 million.
It's software like this that has led to many of us living double lives (I'm a PC at work and a Mac at home). Thankfully, we no longer have to divide our love between the two, because it's actually possible to run Visual Studio on a Mac with a little something known as a virtual machine. What exactly is virtual machine technology? Virtual machine technology allows you to run another PC – in this case, a Windows PC – on your Mac OS X as piece of software that functions just like the physical machine itself. A Windows PC, which is normally a physical device, takes the form of a file, which is handled using virtual machine technology. It's almost as if it fools the Windows OS into thinking that it's running on a physical machine. Virtual machine technology isn't just limited to running Windows on a Mac; you can run any OS that supports your standard PC architecture.
What's more is it's used everywhere, from well known cloud systems to small software houses wanting to host and test their software on portable, clone-able environments that are simple to setup. (And it's affordable, but we'll talk more about that in a minute.) What about performance? Performance can be a concern when using a virtual machine to run an entire OS on top of a machine's own homegrown version. Two operating systems running side by side in this manner require extra resources from the underlying hardware.
However, the amount of extra performance required to run a virtual machine is surprisingly low. And in the course, you'll witness the impact a virtual machine running Windows and Visual Studio has on its host, the Mac OS X. This smooth performance is in the details of Apple's hardware and the cleverness of the virtual machine software. 
Visual Studio Express For Web
All the Apple components, both hardware and software, are designed to work together in the most efficient way on a Mac. These are not off-the-shelf components placed onto a third party developed circuit board. The Mac OS X itself features drivers specifically tuned for the hardware and the OS X. Each of these factors positively affects the Mac's performance, and it truly shines when running software like virtual machines.