Microsoft had long ago released a decent Remote Desktop Client (RDC) app for PowerPC-based OS X Macs. It's still freely available on Mactopia. On the newer Intel-based Macs, RDC has to run under emulation via OS X's Rosetta. The experience, IMHO, leaves something to be desired. With any luck, Microsoft will release an Intel port of RDC one of these days.
In the mean time, it's slow enough that's it's almost unusable for doing Visual Studio work. It flickers way too much and goes nuts over-scrolling when I try to block-select. To be fair, I'm working with the most basic of the current Mac mini models: 1.66 GHz Core Duo CPU, 512 MB RAM and a 60 GB SATA drive. I know the machine is memory-bound. 512 MB is too light for any major OS these days. I have a 2 GB upgrade arriving in two days.
It would be easy to chalk up the RDC sluggishness to the RAM constraint, but after installing TSClientX, which incorporates the venerable rdesktop and TSClient packages into a seamless Mac .dmg, I had to cast a suspiscious eye on RDC. TSClientX ran like lightning, even with my measly 512 MB. The whole Aqua/X11 full-screen switching thing (see the docs) is a minor pain, but the performance is worth it.
I hesitate to really cast doubt on MS RDC until I upgrade my memory. Emulation is both CPU and memory-intensive. Still, I'd suspect that an Intel-native rdesktop app will always outrun an emulated app on an optimized machine.
One major edge enjoyed by the X11/rdesktop approach is in the use of the F keys while debugging in Visual Studio. With the MS RDC, F10/11 (corresponding to Step Over/Step Into in Visual Studio) are commandeered by OS X's Expose feature. This really hinders the debugging process. When X11 is run in full-screen mode I have the use of my critical F keys under rdesktop. On the flip side, running X11 in full-screen mode means that I have to toggle back & forth between X11 and OS X's Aqua (the normal Mac desktop) using Command-Option-A.
There's no perfect solution right now. I'll re-evaluate MS RDC once I upgrade my RAM, but my money's on TSClientX/rdesktop.
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