Microsoft Remote Desktop for the Mac

At the office, I work on a Windows based desktop. I prefer developing on the Mac, but I really have no choice since my development environment revolves around ASP which requires IIS. Although I already have a PC designated just for me at work, I still bring my MacBook Pro to and from work if I ever had some free time to work on some personal things.

One little pain for me was not being able to access my workstation during a meeting. Sure, a lot of the work we do is web-based, but there are still windows-only desktop applications which are handy to have open in front of your eyes. One of these applications allows us to access a centralized database of all the projects that are going on and what status they are at. And although I could have booted into XP on my MBP, my work would still be sitting on my desktop, plus I don’t really feel like spending hours hunting for these applications again off the network drives. For a while, our team had the luxury of having a team member that had a windows laptop as their workstation, but they’ve transitioned off so we would start to miss checking the status on our projects.

Then I came along Microsoft’s Remote Desktop client for the Mac while reading up on Office 2008 at Microsoft’s Mactopia site. It got released under the radar since the new client is still in beta, but it works.

I’d like to report that it is very smooth and snappy. I’ve used a lot of remote desktop clients, especially while I was working as IT support, and this client works great on my MBP. The interface is very similar to the way Remote Desktop works on Windows, so switchers should feel right at home.