MarteyDodoo.com

Since I am not in school anymore (and therefore no longer have homework), I feel that I should be keeping productive by doing more programming. Unfortunately, my move to Linux presents a bit of a conundrum - in order to ensure that the largest possible audience can run my creations on their computers, it is necessary that I take steps to ensure that my applications can run on Microsoft Windows.

For a creative standpoint, this is not a major setback. While my most recent desktop development has been in C#, I should be able to use GTK# in order to ensure that my applications run on all three major operating systems (Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux).

Debugging is another story. While I am running Linux natively, I only have access to computers running Windows at work, where I obviously cannot debug personal projects. There are three possible solutions to this conundrum.

• Dual-booting, which I find unacceptable. The reasons I do not like it have been previously covered on this website.
• The best solution would probably for me to get a second computer. In this case, best is defined in terms of material happiness and not financial solvency.
• Virtualization would be better for my finances. Having some experience running Windows XP through VMWare Player, I feel confident that this option would work for debugging.

The Apple fanpeople in the audience are probably already halfway through the mental composition of a comment noting that while I can run Windows in a virtual machine, I cannot do the same with OS X (at least, not legally). This problem is not one of my making, so I refuse to worry about it.