As for why it is that Windows degrades.. I’d love to know. I doubt it’s any single thing or we’d have a fix for it by now, but rather a combination of registry fragmentation, disk fragmentation, page file fragmentation and who knows what else. But it does seem like a problem unique to Windows.

Its definitely an interesting observation about Windows degrading and your Mac not. I wonder what the root cause of that is. Its not like the actual windows files are changing,but it still seams like there is something MS could do to help the situation.

Mono is an excellent project and they’ve done some great work, but as far as I know, it’s tough to make an app that I can distribute to Mac users that doesn’t require some futzing to get it to work. That’s no good.

For me the great things about .NET were the language (a garbage collected modern language). the framework, and the tools. Working with Win32 is no fun, and .NET does a great job of encapsulating it. Visual Studio .NET, C#, and the .NET Framework makes for an amazing combination.

But, of course, it’s Windows only. It’s in Microsoft’s interest to keep developers on their platform, and they do a good job of it. But the Mac is making huge progress in terms of user base, and especially for the independent developer, there are a lot of customers there.

Win32 and Carbon were close enough that you could abstract them, and write one application that ran on both platforms without too much effort. But now that Apple is focusing on Cocoa, while Microsoft is focusing on WPF, there’s much less common ground. Both sides seem to be encouraging developers to pick one or the other, and really, developers don’t want to do that. I certainly don’t.

That’s where Flex comes in. Flex Builder is based on Eclipse, an IDE that’s comparable to Visual Studio. ActionScript is a JavaScript-based language that has modern features like closures, and great performance thanks to the Flash VM and it’s JITter. And for client (desktop app) development, Flex beats even the .NET framework thanks to one great feature: Binding.

I don’t know WPF but in Windows Forms, if you want a button’s enabled state to depend on whether a text field has text in it or not, you’d have to have a change event on the text field and update the button when the text changes. In Flex, you set the button’s visible property to “{textField.length > 0}” and the event system takes care of it for you. It takes a bit of mental gymnastics to get used to and figure out how to exploit this it but once you do, it’s a huge time saver, and simplifies your code to boot.

But switching to the Mac wasn’t so much about Flex as it was about the Mac OS. It’s true a lot of people buy MacBook Pro’s and install Windows on them, or spend their time in a VM, or find other ways to basically pretend they’re still using Windows. I’m trying not to do that.

The mainstream apps I use – basically Microsoft Office and Adobe’s Creative Suite – are there on the Mac. I’m using Safari as my main web browser. I use iTunes for music, QuickTime to play videos (with plugins for common formats like DivX), and really don’t miss a lot of Windows apps. Visual Studio is the only one I can think of.

There are some great technologies for developers built into the Apple OS. Check out Instruments, on Apple’s site, for example – it’s like PerfMon on steroids. Also check out Automator – application automation that’s actually accessible to users.

As far as gaming goes, I bought an Xbox 360 and that’s where my gaming happens. I think the only PC game I still play is World of Warcraft, and that exists on the Mac as well.

Anyway I don’t want to get all Mac fanboy here. My main point is this: I realized a while ago that everything I was using my Windows PC for I could do on a Mac, except for Visual Studio. Once I managed to not need that anymore at home, I was free to switch.

(When I’m working at home, I’m actually using a VPN to work and running Visual Studio on my desktop there. That’s kind of cheating, but I was doing that even when I was running Windows).

I’d like to hear more about the reasoning why, and what its like to be a guy from the MS/.NET side of things going to dev on Mac.

I mean theres a lot of guys now buying MBP, but you hardly hear them actually whispering about their dirty secret of developing on Macs, or in Mac systems…. so for me it’s pretty interesting.