The Mac Apps I Actually Use for Development

Coming from Windows, I expected running C# and SQL Server tooling on a Mac to be a fight. It hasn't been. The .NET side is cross-platform now, and most of what I actually need has a native Apple Silicon build.

The two editors I keep open side by side

Rider handles the C# and .NET backend. VS Code stays open next to it for Angular and the frontend, mostly because it's lighter for TypeScript and templates, and keeping the two workspaces visually separate helps me stay oriented about which layer I'm actually working in.

Testing the layer in between

Postman is where I send requests before I've even built the Angular service that'll eventually call the same endpoint, passing tokens and checking the response shape directly against the ASP.NET Core controller. Azure Data Studio is what I use for the database side, connecting to a local SQL Server container or an Azure SQL instance to run queries and check the schema without leaving a Mac-native tool.

The rest of the setup

Docker runs the local SQL Server instance, and I lean on a lighter Docker Desktop alternative to keep the resource usage down while it's running in the background. For window management, Rectangle is still doing the job it started doing when I first switched to Mac, snapping the frontend and backend windows to opposite sides of the screen so I'm not constantly alt-tabbing between them.

What a normal session looks like

Three things running at once, one per layer. SQL Server in a container:

docker run -e "ACCEPT_EULA=Y" -e "MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD=YourPassword123!" \
  -p 1433:1433 -d mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2022-latest

The API, with watch so it rebuilds as I edit:

dotnet watch run

And the frontend:

ng serve --open

From there I check the database in Azure Data Studio, hit the API in Postman, write the backend in Rider, and build the UI in VS Code. None of it is exotic. It's just the smallest set of tools that covers a full stack without fighting the OS to get there.