I use Windows at work so for some variety I have moved to a Mac at home. The 2010 Mac Mini is a decent little machine with the RAM upgraded to 4GB. For Windows development you need Visual Studio, which means running Windows on your Mac. Bootcamp is one way of doing this, but then you lose all the benefits of OSX as your host OS. The secret is of course Parallels Desktop which allows you to run Windows virtualized on your Mac.

Just to hammer the point home about how important it is to upgrade to .NET 4.0 if you are using WPF, here are some comparison screenshots of the text rendering in WPF 3.5 and 4.0: Pay attention to the difference between the text rendering on lines 2 and 3. Line 2 shows the new Display formatting mode available in WPF 4.0. This renders the text the same way as the rest of Windows – the shape of the font is distorted so that lines fall on pixel boundaries.

Much noise has been made about Evernote’s new Windows client. For version 4, they dropped WPF/.NET and released a C++ native application. They were pretty damning with their reasoning: Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way. While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.