Best way to set up a dev environment for .Net development on a mac (via parallels)

Docker Desktop
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I have googled to my hearts content but haven’t figured out the best way to approach this. I don’t mind reading but just haven’t hit the right article to help.

I am doing .Net development inside a windows vm. I’m wanting to start to incorporate Docker in my development stack, but I’m a little leary to introduce a VM inside of a VM. I run across GitHub - Parallels/docker-machine-parallels: Parallels driver for Docker Machine https://github.com/docker/machine, but I’m so new to using Docker it isn’t helping me too much.

Has anyone come up with an elegant solution for this.

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I’m looking for the same thing. Did you end up finding an answer?

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I’m not a docker expert by any means - have only recently started using it myself - but I’ve been doing .net development on a Mac with parallels for about 6 years.
I ran into the same concerns over the last few months as I’ve started working with Docker and the VM in a VM concept seemed like it would be asking for problems.
What I ended up doing was creating a small Windows Server 2019 VM in Parallels that runs side by side with my normal Windows 10 development VM. I didn’t give it much for CPU/memory to start with, and just installed server core. I enabled the Containers feature and I believe that had a couple prerequisites it needed. These were good resources:


I opened up access to the Windows Server VM from my Windows 10 VM and I can run docker commands over there, publish/start/stop containers etc. This doesn’t interfere with the resources available to my Windows 10 VM and seems to perform well overall.

What I haven’t been able to figure out yet is getting VS Pro 2019 to accept that Docker is running, just not locally. In VS Code you can setup a remote docker host, and I tried the same thing in JetBrains Rider and it worked. VS Pro though seems to specifically check to see that the Docker host is running locally. While you can of course still push your container over to the server VM it is nice to be able to use the Docker tools in VS directly and so far I haven’t been able to get that going in VS Pro.