In the last week I've discovered at least three .NET developers who've decided to say goodbye to the Windows platform, and begin a new life with Linux or Mac OS.

This is pretty darn surprising!! Not because Windows is such an amazing platform, but because moving to a new environment must be a hard thing to do.

As a .NET developer, I find myself having so many dependencies on various windows applications, servers, tools, utils and libraries that all play a central part in my software development tasks. Figuring out how to lose/replace these things must take some work. I'm also an Exchange/Smartphone/Outlook fan, so I'd need to consider re-thinking my productivity-related services.

I was speaking to my good friend Thomas Hansen who's just moved over to Ubuntu. Thomas isn't just dicking about for fun, he's a serious, intelligent and skilled .NET consultant who's made a living from .NET over the last 5 years. Furthermore, he's just launched a business developing and selling a suite of cool .NET AJAX controls. They're growing too, having just recruited Jan Blomquist, one of the key guys behind DotNetNuke, to help get Gaia AJAX to the top.

So, I was shocked about Thomas's move to Ubuntu, and asked..

• What did you go and do that for !?"
• How the f**k do you you live without Resharper!? (Ctrl-B rocks!)
• What are you developing in?

It seems that Thomas was disappointed in Vista, and didn't think that windows is the way of the future. He's now happily coding away with Mono Develop. I say happily, he does miss the debugger support, and never got into Resharper :-)

I was also browsing the blog of Scott Bellaware only to discover that he has moved over to a Mac. Seems like he found a cool upgrade path...

I've been configuring my new MBP (15", SR C2D @ 2.4Mhz, 7200rpm) for almost a week now. I started with Bootcamp (boy, this mother screams on Bootcamp) and started playing with Parallels to load my Bootcamp image as a VM. Pretty good performance on a 22 project solution. If you intend to buy Parallels, get it straight from the developer if you don't want to wait for your "free upgrade" to Parallels 3, the first version that lets you boot your Bootcamp Vista image.

I usedO2M to migrate from Outlook to Mail, Address Book, and iCal. iGTD to bind them all. iPhone arrives tomorrow.

###Tempting for me? I haven't quite worked out why yet, but I'm definatley keen to escape Windows. It's like my subconcious has decided it's a good thing to do, but hasn't talked the rest of my concious into doing it yet :-)

I find myself having thoughts like...

• Those macs look sooo sweet in Dixons, I want one of each.
• Windows is boring, I've been using it for years
• Microsoft seem to have hit an off note with Vista, and both Mac and Linux are booming
• Linux is doing a great job as a server, I guess it should make a good desktop
• Windows uses too much RAM, and is slower than my Ubuntu box with half the resources
• Some of the new Mac apps are looking great
• I want to join my fellow Ruby On Rails developers using Textmate
• I'm fed up with reinstalling my laptop every 8 months.

Anyone else thinking of taking the plunge?