I bought a MacBook Pro Retina wanting to upgrade the memory, then realized the Retina models have it soldered onto the motherboard.

I need to run Visual Studio for ASP.NET development but can't fathom paying $80 for a Parallels license at the moment. I've tried VirtualBox, but the RAM usage is really high for the 4GB I'm limited to.

FML.

I used VMware Fusion for a Win8 image and VS2013 (never got around to updating to 2015) and it worked just fine. Allocated 3GB for host and 5GB for guest. Or it could've been 2/6.

I think there is vs community edition for mac and xamarian is also there.

.net core just came out and asp.net core will reach rtm soon. You can use visual studio code on your Mac. If you install omnisharp you'll get intellisense too.

If you insisted on using full blown visual studio then perhaps you can create an ec2 instance on aws then remote desktop from your Mac?

Bootcamp?

@Trey The RAM usage is high because VS sucks it all. I don't believe your experience is likely to improve with either Parallels or Fusion. I once had a Mac and I ended up using VS via VM more than anything else, so I went back to Windows.

If you need both OS's side-by-side, VirtualBox as good as anything. Otherwise, as someone has already said, Bootcamp.

You can install Windows on the retina models with Intel processors. I had mine dual booted for a while.

You could buy a serious laptop pc with windows, less expensive, more powerful, upgradable and don't need virtualization to develop in .net ... I know it's not fashion because there is no shiny apple logo

Oh shut the piehole, and let him use what machine he likes.. Jesus man