In the spirit of truly immersing myself in Rails development, I’ve come to realize that even though it’s 100% possible to write Rails applications on Windows, the experience is less than ideal.  I’m sure some of you out there are very successful Rails developers using Windows as your primary OS and more power to you!  But this is my journey, and I feel like I really should use the best-of-breed development environment for the task at hand, and Windows just isn’t going to cut it.  So… I decided that OSX was the best for me.  It seems like the vast majority of the Rails community uses OSX for development, and I don’t mind following in their well-established footsteps!

“But wait!,” I hear you say, “Aren’t you a .NET developer, and don’t you have production websites running on ASP.NET MVC?”  Ah, yes, my fair reader, you are correct!  But in today’s world of virtualization, especially on an OSX host, there’s no reason you can’t run your entire .NET development environment inside a beefy VM, and my main machine is definitely beefy enough to handle it!  See for yourself:

On my main machine, I’m actually running Snow Leopard now.  I installed OSX 10.6 from a retail DVD (thanks Apple Store!) and I’m loving every minute of it.  My virtual machine is a Windows 7 32-bit install with the “Windows Classic” theme because it honestly looks cleaner to me.  VMWare Fusion makes all of this possible, and I couldn’t be happier.  My performance is rock solid, so far.  And the best part is, now I can work in the best .NET environment through sweet virtualization, and the best Rails environment because let’s face it:  TextMate on OSX is sexy as hell:

If there’s interest in a more specific outline of how I got all this set up, I could definitely make a “How To” post or maybe a screencast that details everything.