Our friends over at Softies on Rails have put a book out that will help any .NET developer looking to work with Ruby on Rails.  The Softies crew was an early inspiration for me to try out Ruby and Mac development, and I am really happy for them that they were able to put this tome together.

The book will help new Rails developers coming from a Microsoft/closed-source world avoid pitfalls and get up to speed quickly.

1. Clean your PC up to make sure you have eliminated anything you don’t need. This will ensure that you don’t have a larger virtual disk (the big file that your PC will be stored as) than you need. Here is how I did that:
• I installed FolderSizes, from Key Metric Software: http://www.foldersizes.com/download-folder-sizes/index.htm This allowed me to see where all the “hidden” large items were on my disk. I was able to remove over 10GB of old files and garbage this way. Be sure to eliminate “Temporary Internet Files”, “Temp” directories, etc.
• I ran “Add Remove Programs” and eliminated everything I didn’t need, or what would be easily replicated natively in OS X. For example, I removed iTunes, Picasa, a bunch of utilities, etc.
• I copied all of my music, photos, projects, personal files to an external hard drive. If you have an external hard drive (USB 2.0 preferrably as it will work great between both your PC and your Mac), do the following:
• Plug it in to your PC
• Create a folder called “archive” on it
• Copy your music, photos, personal files, etc. to it
• That’s it – you are done.*
• (* if your external drive is formatted with NTFS it might be a bit tricky to get it to be recognized by your Mac, so try to use a FAT32 drive if you can – I’ll post NTFS instructions later as I had to go through this)

OK, now that your system is nice and clean, you are ready to convert it into a virtual machine.

2. Convert your PC into a virtual machine using VMWare Converter.

• Download VMWare Converter from here: http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/eval.html
• Install and run it.
• Click “Import Machine” on the button bar.
• Start the wizard, choose “Physical Computer” from the source screen. (click next)
• Choose “This Local Machine” (click next)
• Converter will evaluate your machine. You should choose at least your “main volume” (the larger one).
• At this point, to save space on my Mac, I chose to enter a custom size (40GB) to hold my current system (28GB) and have some breathing room. If your PC has 80GB+ of storage, you probably don’t need to have a virtual disk that big. YMMV.
• Click next (twice) and choose “VMware standalone virtual machine” (this is important). Click next again.
• Give your machine a name “MYLAPTOP” or something like that, then choose a location (a USB 2.0 disk is a perfect choice) to save it to. Click next a few more times (no more advance setup required), and start your machine import.
• Wait a few hours.

Whew! That was some experience, metaphorically similar to a religious conversion – you are at the altar but not quite there yet. Now you are ready to import your virtual PC into your Mac and join the dark/light side of the force (depending on your POV).

3. Install VMWare Fusion on your Intel-powered Mac OS X (Tiger) and “enjoy” your PC , exactly the way it was, on your Mac.

• Download VMWare fusion onto your Mac: http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/eval.html
• You may want to review the release notes.
• Install it.
• Copy your virtual machine file from your USB 2.0 drive (see step 2 above), to your Mac. ~/Virtual Machines is a good directory for it (in other words Home -> Virtual Machines — create the directory first)
• Run VMWare fusion.
• Open the machine from your filesystem.
• Off you go!

4. (Optional) Your new VM might behave erratically at first or force you to “Activate Windows”

• If your VM bluescreens, just reboot it. Its normal behavior because you just essentially ripped the soul of your PC out and put it in another shell. It freaks out a bit. You shouldn’t need to reboot more than a few times.
• If Windows asks for Activation, go through the steps. Your product key should be somewhere on your computer. If that doesn’t work, go through the “I’m not connected to the internet, activate by phone” menu and call them and get a new activation code.

If you have problems, leave comments here and I’ll try to answer them. Also you should check out the VMware support forums.

Good luck and happy computing.

Trying to get out of the development rut I’ve been in.

I love .NET. I love C#. I can build powerful apps very quickly in .NET. However, taking these apps and getting my team to maintain them consistently, and building a web-ready infrastructure around them to support both high-traffic volume and Agile development has been and continues to be costly. Or maybe I just need a change of pace.

So, I go to try to learn Ruby on Windows. I built a Wiki, a small blog app, etc. But it just doesn’t “feel right.” The warm comfort of Visual Studio 2005 is right there, a click away. Getting over the hump is hard when an old friend is right there. “Ed, don’t bother figuring out how to get postgreSql running on XP – just use me. I’m easy.”

On the other side, the Mac world seems to have adopted Ruby as development framework of choice. It’s clean. There is no Visual Studio ( which I am still convinced is the best IDE ever built ). You are forced to learn the low-level details that for so long have been obfuscated from pure .NET/SQL developers.

So I’ve been checking out Softies on Rails. Great blog.

Particularly, the Mac forum there seems to speak right to me. At this point I think I might just pick up a 13″ MacBook to learn Rails, use as a small “internet machine” around the house, and start what might be a sad but inevitable move away from the womb of Microsoft development.

Wish me luck.