Parallels Desktop for Mac is a hypervisor-based virtualization solution that makes it easy to run any number of operating systems inside separate windows on your Mac desktop. For developers, this means you can simultaneously run Xcode on Mac and Visual Studio on Windows 8. The Parallels window behaves like a normal Mac window, so you can copy content from your desktop and place it directly into the Parallels virtual machine instance just as you would from one Mac window to another. You can even run Visual Studio (and other Windows applications) directly on the Mac OS X desktop (no Windows VM window, just the app).
For cross-platform development of iOS apps, Windows Store Apps, and Windows Phone 8 apps, Parallels is unparalleled since you can work with two different operating systems and related dev tools at the same time, in the same session, from the same desktop.
Visual Studio For Mac Os X
Visual Studio is a new member of the Visual Studio family, enabling developers on macOS to build apps for mobile, Web, and cloud with Xamarin and.NET Core, as well as games with Unity. Use Visual Studio to develop apps for Android, macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, Web, and cloud. In November 2016, we introduced Visual Studio for Mac, the newest member of the Visual Studio family. Visual Studio for Mac is a developer environment optimized for building mobile and cloud apps with Xamarin.
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Here, Kurt Schmucker, a product manager at Parallels, gives a brief summary of Parallels Desktop and demonstrates how to run Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 on your Mac without rebooting to a Windows partition first. Kurt demonstrates the Visual Studio Windows Phone emulator running along side the Xcode iPhone emulator.