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Issue 21.2

COLUMN

Xojo on Windows ARM on Mac

Testing Windows on Apple Silicon

Issue: 21.2 (March/April 2023)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 8,729
Starting Page Number: 53
Article Number: 21206
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

You may have heard the recent news that Microsoft finally officially blessed running Windows 11 ARM edition on M-series Macs using Parallels virtualization software. While it was possible to do this before, it wasn't supported, nor encouraged, and a bit of a hack, so I never explored the option. However, with this news I decided to give it a go.

There were two aspects of this new support that interested me. First, the fact that it was official meant it's more of a viable solution, and second, that Windows 11 ARM apparently has some x86 emulation built-in so it can run Intel apps. Those would be slower, of course, but for my needs of just testing software under Windows, they would be sufficient. (If I understood things correctly, originally Windows for ARM only ran Windows ARM apps, which felt rather useless.)

Another factor is that I now have a powerful M1 Max system with plenty of memory and hard disk space. In the past, when I've explored virtualization, I didn't like having to dedicate a large percentage of my drive toward a VM that I only used a few times a year.

Now my needs and interest in Windows are extremely minimal. Long ago, I decided not to bother with cross-platform development. I barely have time to keep up with the Mac, let alone other operating systems. There are times, however, I'd like to see if a simple utility or demo app I write for xDev actually works on Windows. This is especially true if it's an article about cross-platform development.

I don't have enough interest or need to actually want to buy a Windows PC or expend many resources (time or dollars) toward it, but if I can do it easily and inexpensively, it might be worth exploring. (I can imagine many Windows users feeling the same way about the Mac.) Keep in mind the last version of Windows I used in any significant fashion was Windows XP!

Since Parallels offers a 14-day trial, I downloaded the VM for MacOS (https://www.parallels.com). This wasn't too difficult a process. The initial download is small and quick (see Figure 1) and the installation downloads the rest of what it needs (see Figure 2). Once Parallels is running, it prompts you to install Windows 11 (see Figure 3).

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