Has anyone used Visual Studio on a 32 GB or 64 GB laptop?

[StephenG1CMZ]

(09-14-2016 06:59 PM)Nick Wrote:  In my experience, I create virtual machines for Windows + <various development / testing> on 40GB discs so that's the traditional minimum for Win 7 and below, I'd say.

However, Windows 10 is surprisingly small. If you only installed a subset of VS Community (the default) and Windows 10 you could probably do it on the primary 32GB disc.

Additionally, if you were to format the SD card as NTFS (undocumented) you could use the "virtual directory" feature of NTFS to map additional space onto your main drive. Also, you could supplement your storage by using compression in some places and disabling or limiting certain features like hibernate or virtual memory.

If you want to "try before you buy" download VirtualBox (free) and create the virtual drives in the size you plan to use. Download a trial of Windows 10 (the enterprise trial is usually readily available) and VS Community for the features you plan to use. Don't forget extras such as SQL Express or any others.

I wouldn't recommend VS on a rPI... I've tried it on an rPI3 and it's no more useful as any good text/code editor -- the IDE features from VS that make complex tasks so fluent are missing. But, it's technically possible... that's how C/C++ was written for years.

2 GB RAM is tight.... close to the theoretical... 4GB minimum... you can likely upgrade that for ~$20 shipped or less and get 3GB (if the laptop is 32 bit).

Yes, an external USB HDD could supplement or even extend your disk but you trade off the ability to code + netflix from the sofa somewhat. External USB flash drives are good, you can get the ones now "nano size" that mount flush so they don't bump into things and you can leave them in (good if you're mapping folders to them).

I had not considered trying VS on Raspi - I assumed that if I got a Raspi because a 32 GB laptop would struggle, that I would use its tools rather than Microsoft's.