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How much space is roughly required for .NET development?

[I have searched but not found an answer to this specific question and fear it may be against the rules of the site so please delete if so]

I have recently gotten a new MacBook Air with an 128GB SSD and 4GB RAM (the store I bought it from that I had a product exchange from didn't do 8GB versions) and whilst I like programming for iOS and Android, at work I am sometimes required to do .NET development.

I am trying to size up how much of the paltry HDD I should allocate to the Windows partition, I am thinking 70GB but is that enough?

It will be Windows 8.1, VS 2013 and SQL Server 2012 for now, but perhaps Sharepoint in future, and my MAIN question is to all the .NET developers, what programs will I perhaps have to play with further down the line?

IF anyone could suggest an appropriate size it'd be much appreciated!

Solution

  • If you're just 'playing'/learning with VB or c#.NET (or even writing fairly decent-sized apps) you could just develop on the Mac side for now using MonoDevelop. One can, and I have, written perfectly good apps that way. You can use all the .Net stuff this way except for WinForms/WPF for the GUI. MonoDevelop uses Gtk instead, but it has a GUI designer built in and it all works perfectly nicely. You can do ADO.net(database stuff) with MonoDevelop but the in-IDE tools for Database design and certainly for the Entity Framework is quite poor compared to the tools available in even the Express versions of VS. That's not to say you can't use databases from within MonoDevelop, you can, but you don't get lots of pretty GUIs to design your tables and make your relationships etc. etc.

    So, if you're a pro-developer rather than a learner and you 'need' to write Windows Forms/WPF code or, to be fair, anything that talks to a SQL-like database then you really need a VS set up. As for how much that will take up of your HD it's hard to put a figure on it. My Win7 boot partition with Win7, VS, full SDK, SQLSEE, Office 2012 and a few other 'essential tools' weighs in around 40Gb IIRC. So, if you go for 50-60Gb I think you'd be okay.

    I hope that helps.