I have ordered a new Mac Laptop. It is a nice big one for my day job. I will be installing Bootcamp and or Parallels to run the programs needed for mentoring robotics.
This will not be used as a driver’s laptop.
Programming, CAD, and CAM.
Java, Solidworks and fusion 360.
Bootcamp is not able to resize disk partitions easily so I need to allocate enough space for the next 4 years or so of robotics stuff.
I hear that Visual Studio can be a pig for hard drive space. Needing as much as 100 GB and more GB with each update. If it is that bad then I might want to program on the Mac side where most of my disk space will be. Or I could put it into it’s own partition where I can kill and rebuild it to slim it down each year. That will require a second Windows 10 license. I suspect that programming on the Mac side might be a bit clumsy with hit or miss support and libraries. I am new to java. We have used Labview in the past. Would be nice to refer back to our previous code.
Solidworks probably works better in Bootcamp than Parallels due to direct access to the graphics card. For the sake of workflow I will probably do my CAM in fusion 360 on the same partition as Solidworks. We use Fusion 360 for CAM because it supports our Shapeoko well.
I may want Inventor because I know it and might want to learn Creo.
I need to figure out if a 256GB partition for all of this is enough. A list of disk space usage for the different apps would be ideal.
It’s not. It works just fine. For background, all of our students get Macbook Air’s from the school, and we have them set up with VS Code and the libraries, along with github integration, so they can program from their own laptops. Haven’t had any problems with it!
Even if you are referring to the full visual studio, it is not anywhere near 100 GB. If I remember correctly, the C++ development workload took 8-10 GB when I installed it on VS19. For and CAD software, I would definitely not want to run it in a VM. I’m not sure how parallels works, but many VMs will emulate old graphics cards that will likely not be supported by most CAD software.
Whenever you re-install windows - you should be able to use the same product key as you had previously (either via being saved on your windows account, manually entering it at install time, or windows finding it burned on the motherboard somewhere(I think???)).
I have the .NET Core and Xamarin features installed on my Mac’s Visual Studio. It doesn’t take up more than a few GBs. Visual Studio Code is super light weight and takes less than a GB.
Pro Tip: Check ebay for Windows 10 Licenses. They can be had for less than $5 and I’ve never had a problem with them. It’s worth it just to get the ‘Register Windows Now’ text off the screen
I program WPI Lib on VS Code on a Mac all the time. It works great. I keep a Windows VM on VirtualBox basically just for the driver station and setup tools.
I was not aware that Visual Studio Code was not Visual Studio. Big difference. Now that I look into it, I was barking up the wrong tree. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
There is, as of 2017, a Visual Studio for Mac but it is not the same as Visual Studio on Windows. And neither of them are where you would want to program Java for FRC.
The system requirements for Visual Studio on Windows said 800MB to 210GB disk space requirements. That had me worried.
Now I see that VS code is just 200MB. Trivial. That is so small I will probably set it up on both the Mac and the Windows side of things and just use whatever I happen to be booted into.
VSCode is indeed quite small, but keep in mind that WPILib and its support software can take up as much as 3-5 G of storage over a season. These software include but are not limited to Gradle, local Maven repository(which gets bigger with new updates), JDK, C++ compiler, VSCode extensions and helper tools like Shuffleboard and RobotBuilder.