I develop software. Mostly Windows software. Lately I’ve been using Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 and C#.
My main machine is a 27″ iMac, fully loaded, thank you very much. I run VMware Fusion on my iMac to run various Windows environments as well as Linux OSes.
To test the software I write for Windows, I develop in a Windows 7 VM (Virtual Machine) on my iMac.
When I want to test a program that I’ve written on my Windows 10 physical (as opposed to a VM) machine, I copy the executable file to the Windows 10 machine, so I can test how the program performs under Windows 10.
To do this quickly, during development I keep a drive mapped from my iMac to the Windows 10 machine by using these steps:
- On my Windows 10 PC, I’ve shared out the folder called “Shared Folder” for this example. By default, some Windows 10 machines share out folders and some you might have to setup a folder to be shared.
- On my Mac, I run Finder and select the “Go” menu selection.
- From there, select “Connect to Server…”
- In the “Server Address:” box, provide the following command to map to the Windows 10 PC, for me this is: smb://windows10pc/shared folder
- You’ll be prompted to enter your credentials for the Windows 10 PC.
- Next, in Finder, you’ll find the shared folder under the “Shared” section on the left-side of Finder.
With my Finder window open to the share folder, I can copy and paste from my Windows 7 VM directly to the shared folder on the Windows 10 machine.
Then, using VNC Viewer on my iMac, I can test the program remotely on the Windows 10 machine as needed. You do need the free version of VNC Server running on the Windows 10 machine and the VNC viewer software on your iMac. Get ’em here. Any mouse or keyboard functions that I want to test, I would then sit in front of the Windows 10 machine to do that.
That’s it!
So if you’re looking to map a folder on your Mac to your Windows PC, the Mac Finder > Go > Connect to Server… is the way to do it.