I remember a time when schools used Mac computers. OK, it was a very long time ago. So, why now is all of the software Windows software? My daughter is in college, and needs to use Microsoft Visual Studio. I've heard of "bootcamp". Can it be used here?

Boot Camp is software provided by Apple that allows you to dual-boot Mac OS X and Windows on an Apple laptop. It still requires a copy of Windows be legitimately purchased in order to be installed. It keeps the Windows installation entirely separate (you must reboot into Windows to use Windows apps using Boot Camp).

Additionally, there are a few applications that cost money (VMware Fusion, Parallels), and some other free apps (Oracle VirtualBox) that allow you to run a virtual Windows machine while Mac OS X is running. All of those still require you to have a legitimate version of Windows to install.

The only way to run Windows apps on Mac OS X without using one of these tools is to install and configure WINE (which is somewhat difficult to get working properly in Mac OS), but I'm not entirely certain whether Visual Studio will run under WINE. WINE has some compatibility issues, so it may not suffice for running Visual Studio -- Visual Studio is a behemoth of an installation and requires a lot to actually work.