Mac Os X: Ways (IDEs, Tools, etc.) to develop application with using C# without bootcamp and virtual machine

Question

I'm a student who is studying Business Informatics. In college, we are using Visual Studio but at home I'm a Mac user. This is where the problem starts; I installed Vmware Fusion to install Windows 7 and Visual Studio but I didn't like its performance because it was laggy even if I gave it 5 gigs ram. So I did a search about how to develop programs with C# on Mac OS C and I found Mono Develop and Xamarin Studio.

I have couple questions about this situation;

1. What are your suggestions? Should I go on with VMware or other ides?

2. If I start a project like basic calculator in Xamarin or Mono
   then can I use or edit it on Windows(visual studio)?

3. I found documentation about installing Mono .Net and its IDE but I absolutely found nothing about Xamarin. All I found about Xamarin is like "Develop Mobile Apps with C# using Xamarin Studio" and Xamarin installer wants me to install Xcode, if I'm not wrong Xcode is for objective-C right? Is there way to use Xamarin to develop C# Desktop apps or web pages?

Answer 1

If you are interested in building mobile apps with C# on both Windows and Mac, then Xamarin Studio on Mac and the Xamarin extension for Visual Studio will help.

If you simply wish to build Windows desktop applications, however, you can use the open source elements in Xamarin Studio (which are inherited from MonoDevelop, since Xamarin Studio is built on top of MonoDevelop) to build your apps.

For example, you can use GTK#. Here is a tutorial page from the Mono Project website about GTK#: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/gtksharp/tutorials/

You can still use Xamarin Studio to edit portable class libraries and C# files on your computer for future use on your Windows lab computers too.