Rider Quicky - Managing Breakpoints

Visual Studio may have fallen out of favor with me but having worked with the IDE for over 20 years that muscle memory is hard to rewrite. From keyboard shortcuts to menu options and settings, I know how to do it in Studio but sometimes I don’t even know if it’s possible using Rider.

I frequently find myself just accepting that ‘this is the way Rider does it’ but sometimes I think; ‘you know what … no, I need to work this out, Rider must be able to do this’. Most of the time I find the way but then I have to say I forget the things that I don’t bump into everyday.

With that in mind I think I need to start writing these down so I don’t have to trawl the internet or the settings to work it out each time.

To kick off this ‘Rider Quicky’ series I look at something that bugged me for quite a while - deleting breakpoints, simple huh?

VS for Mac is Dead, thank god for Rider

Even before Microsoft announced that they were retiring Visual Studio for Mac I have to say that I’d decided to go another way.

I’d never really felt that impressed with VS for Mac, feeling it was always a bit of a second class citizen - which is understandable I guess; Microsoft have Visual Studio 2022 for their own operating system after all so it was probably quite surprising that they released the Mac IDE at all.

Now, Mac users are not being left out in the cold by Microsoft - oh no. They are are suggesting Visual Studio Code for use on the Mac (and Windows and even Linux) which, it is said, can be augmented with powerful extensions to support C#, Blazor and even MAUI development.

But this all felt a little ….. I don’t know, cobbled together to me. I wanted something a little bit more … focused on the job I need it to do. Not a general purpose system that could be tailored for any number of use cases.

Enter Jetbrains Rider for Mac (and Windows and Linux) which in my opinion, despite being not being a free product, is a very worthy replacement.

Running Docker Desktop on Apple Silicon

Almost a year ago I posted about my use of Docker to streamline my development SQL instances and since then I’ve been working quite happily on my aging Mac - until I bought my shiny new Macbook Pro and my instructions didn’t result in a runnable container.

Now I’d checked out a lot of things before putting my hand in my pocket and shelling out for the Macbook and I was wondering what I’d done - maybe I’d fallen at the first hurdle and should have just bought a ‘regular’ Windows laptop instead.

Well, I wasn’t having that - no, not at all.

As with so many problems in technology, I cannot possibly be the first person to have bumped into the, especially as this is an Apple M3 CPU - the 3rd generation of Apple Silicon, surely the early adopters ran into this.

Well, after trawling the internet and going down some blind alleys I managed to get SQL running on Docker on my Macbook Pro, M3 Pro.

TLDR; Basically you need to install the Apple Rosetta application, make sure you are running the latest version of Docker Desktop and enable the use of Rosetta for x86/amd64 emulation.

Pulling the trigger on Mac

I’ve been thinking about going all in on Mac for a while now and with my current one no receiving OS upgrades I am now unable to install the latest version of xCode which means I can’t build Xamarin/MAUI apps targeting iOS devices.

Well, today I finally pulled the trigger and order a new MacBook Pro (MBP) which will be delivered in a couple of days. I’m really looking forward to the performance improvements from my 2015 Macbook Pro and my i7 Windows Workstation (custom built in 2010) to the new M3 Pro CPU in my new purchase.

People I’ve worked with in the past will recall me saying things like ‘you can put an Apple device in my cold dead hands’ but times change and views need to change with them, even mine.

But I could have bought 2 or 3 laptops for what I’ve just spent on the new Macbook - why didn’t I just get a decent laptop for say £1000? Well, it mainly comes down to my need/desire to develop mobile applications.

So, that was 2023 then

I doesn’t seem like nearly 12 months ago that I wrote about my plans for this year and I couldn’t have had any idea how difficult and challenging a year it was going to be.