I bought a mac recently, which I am new to, because I wanted to develop MAUI apps and needed a new laptop.
I had done some, let’s say, not as good as I hoped research, and missed a huge caveat about running windows via parallels.
So, I went ahead and purchased Parallels as well. Installed windows 11, all good so far. Except I couldn’t get docker to work. This is when I saw the huge caveat that windows is fully supported by Microsoft via Parallels even with apple silicon, except, and this is a huge except if you are a windows developer. Hyper-V and WSL are not supported. How did I miss this??
Anyways, what this means is that you can’t run docker desktop on the windows OS (as far as I can see?)
There are lot’s of workarounds for this, where people are suggesting running docker on the host mac and use ports to connect, which are all good.
However, out of the box when you create a project using VS on the windows OS and you want to create a docker compose project or a new Aspire project, these look for docker locally and there is no config, again, as far as I can see, that you can override to use docker on the host.
These leaves me very frustrated as VS for mac is well, not VS and is now not being supported. Using VS Code on the mac and ignoring windows, I could, but I have years of experience with full VS and want to carry on using it.
In my minds eye, I can kind of see a solution where someone (please docker, this could be you!) could create a docker exe that runs on the windows OS but is a proxy to the mac exe/app on the host?
Is it that simple? Or a dummy exe so that VS and c# code things docker is local, but they uses remote calls to the host mac.
I looked through the open source code for Aspire, and can see the check for docker’s existence. But the code that works with docker when debugging and deploying the apps is hidden from me.
Does anyone have any ideas if this would work or where to start? Or even where we could view the underlying VS code that interacts with docker?
I created an issue request with the Aspire team:
This also has a link to someone who looked into the aspire code base:
Exploring the Microsoft Developer Control Plane at the heart of the new .NET Aspire | Anthony Simmon
This then points to where he talks about the DCP model, but I can’t find the source code for this, so assuming for now that it’s not public.
So looking for anyone to help work on a solution to this with me or has one or knows someone at docker or the VS team that could help with this.
that is all 