5 ms·

MS has always been a really developer-friendly company (which is not the same as an open source friendly company). Small tweaks to that model, coupled by reall

by atonse 7y ago

MS has always been a really developer-friendly company (which is not the same as an open source friendly company). Small tweaks to that model, coupled by really solid products that everyone can use since they're free and open source (like TypeScript and VS Code), make it easy to bring that developer-friendliness to the masses. And the substantive move of making .NET open source with the apache license (and .NET core)x really opened up yet another solid technology to the masses that didn't want to run Windows. Kudos to them. Update: before people pounce on me, I mean they're developer friendly to developers in their ecosystem. .NET has had the best docs and tutorials and improvements for many years.

rectang 7y ago
The interests of platform vendors and developers are inherently at odds. Vendors benefit from lockin, while developers benefit from portability. This applies to other OS vendors like Apple, Cloud vendors like AWS and GCP, and so on, just as much as it applies to Microsoft. It's a universal principle.
- bunderbunder 7y ago
  It's true, but Microsoft has also done a pretty good job of failing to lock people into their development platform, and seems to have largely given up on it. Does anybody use COM or WCF anymore, except maybe to maintain or talk to legacy systems? It leaves us in a situation where it's hard to get any more locked into Microsoft than it is to get locked into Haskell: Sure, you can build up a whole lot of dependencies on libraries that don't have great equivalents on other platforms, and any wholesale migration is going to involve rewriting a mountain of code. But interoperability relies on the same open and de facto standards that everyone else is using these days, so your migration paths are exactly the same as they'd be anywhere else.
kemiller2002 7y ago
I agree. They really try and take care of their customers. I think it was the launch of 2017, and my team upgraded right after the release. (I mean like within hours.) We were having some problems with the upgrade and TypeScript (I think), and it asked me to rate it my experience with it so far. Admittedly, I was in a slightly bad mood and aggravated at the time, and I gave it a low score. They wrote me an email and scheduled an hour to talk to like 2 or 3 people from different product teams about what was wrong and how they could make it better. It's not often when a company does that.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  Did anything come out of this? A lot of companies these days are into getting feedback but nothing never comes out of it. I feel like they have departments that collect the feedback and talk to customers with the best intentions but that data barely makes it to the people making the real product decisions.
  - kemiller2002 7y ago
    Whether or not I did anything specifically, I can't say. It did get a lot more stable after a patch or two. I wanted to say that our main problem was it double reference counting the TypeScript files. I think because it was storing a shadow copy of it in another location and that problem went away. (Memory is hazy.) I do remember complaining that F# was not an automatically included in the language selection like C# and VB.NET. I don't believe they ever fixed that, and I can't remember if it's the same way in 2019. You can't win em all I suppose though. :)
sandworm101 7y ago
>> MS has always been a really developer-friendly company Try developing anything for their gaming devices.
ptero 7y ago
I wish MS open model all the best, but I think MS started seriously pursuing those efforts after it lost a lot of power during and after the dotcom boom. In the PC era, MS supported Windows developers (kind of) as they were seen contributing to Windows ecosystem and viewing others in a not to friendly way. Google for "Linux is a cancer", "GPL is a virus", etc. Power corrupts. The transition of MS to the good side roughly coincided with Google's divergence from its earlier "Do not be evil" side as it got a chance to influence people on a worldwide scale. My 2c.
danmaz74 7y ago
> MS has always been a really developer-friendly company I beg to differ. Microsoft historically saw developers as customers they wanted to profit from - I remember how much Visual Studio and MSDN access used to cost back in the day, if you weren't a student. If it hadn't been for the competition from open source tools, I'm pretty sure they would have continued that way. This was true even to the point of hurting themselves. The most egregious example I remember was not including any installer for Windows together with the paid Visual Studio - that was a separate package. I wonder how many millions of users got their DLLs and settings messed up because of this choice, and how much brand value Microsoft lost to Apple because of it...
- tracker1 7y ago
  MSDN is still pretty damned expensive... That is a significant profit center. They've also had a lot of free and/or open tools over the years. I learned C# with a big not MS book, and the command line compiler alone. In late 2001-2002, I was unemployed and it was nearly impossible to find work as a developer. I spent my free time learning the ins and outs of C#, and by mid 2002 was working FT again. By comparison, I also tried to get into Java, and it was painful. Not the Java language, but the tools. Getting a simple hello world in Java wasn't fun at all, getting anything more complex outright painful. I didn't pay MS a single dime. Through the early 2000's I did a lot of ASP.Net development. Both in, and out of MS's sphere. I used Castle Monrail on Mono in Suse Linux. I also used .Net in Windows. I built a standalone kiosk system on Suse that used an embedded browser for the UI via Mono and a Mono backend. I also worked in MS shops, where the Windows and MSDN licenses were paid by the company. I'm generally skeptical of MS. I was hugely skeptical of Silverlight. I don't like that MS doesn't have an official client for MS Team in Linux (despite MS basically having the best cross platform Electron tools) and generally falling short on Linux all around these days. MS tends to make their money when developers using their tools makes money. Historically off of Windows licenses, today probably as much or more so from Azure. Not counting Windows and o365. And while I would prefer to be on a Linux desktop/laptop at work, I do appreciate the work they've done with Docker and the WSL teams to make development for non-MS better overall. As to installers, there's InstallShield, NSIS, Inno Setup, Wix and a lot of others that have come up over the years. I think there was a light version of Install Shield with VSTS. I don't think MS has been nearly as bad on developers as you seem to feel. At least MS doesn't force you to turn over 30% of your income to them like Apple does.

by atonse 7y ago

rectang 7y ago

The interests of platform vendors and developers are inherently at odds. Vendors benefit from lockin, while developers benefit from portability. This applies to other OS vendors like Apple, Cloud vendors like AWS and GCP, and so on, just as much as it applies to Microsoft. It's a universal principle.

bunderbunder 7y ago
It's true, but Microsoft has also done a pretty good job of failing to lock people into their development platform, and seems to have largely given up on it. Does anybody use COM or WCF anymore, except maybe to maintain or talk to legacy systems? It leaves us in a situation where it's hard to get any more locked into Microsoft than it is to get locked into Haskell: Sure, you can build up a whole lot of dependencies on libraries that don't have great equivalents on other platforms, and any wholesale migration is going to involve rewriting a mountain of code. But interoperability relies on the same open and de facto standards that everyone else is using these days, so your migration paths are exactly the same as they'd be anywhere else.

kemiller2002 7y ago

I agree. They really try and take care of their customers. I think it was the launch of 2017, and my team upgraded right after the release. (I mean like within hours.) We were having some problems with the upgrade and TypeScript (I think), and it asked me to rate it my experience with it so far. Admittedly, I was in a slightly bad mood and aggravated at the time, and I gave it a low score. They wrote me an email and scheduled an hour to talk to like 2 or 3 people from different product teams about what was wrong and how they could make it better. It's not often when a company does that.

maxxxxx 7y ago
Did anything come out of this? A lot of companies these days are into getting feedback but nothing never comes out of it. I feel like they have departments that collect the feedback and talk to customers with the best intentions but that data barely makes it to the people making the real product decisions.
- kemiller2002 7y ago
  Whether or not I did anything specifically, I can't say. It did get a lot more stable after a patch or two. I wanted to say that our main problem was it double reference counting the TypeScript files. I think because it was storing a shadow copy of it in another location and that problem went away. (Memory is hazy.) I do remember complaining that F# was not an automatically included in the language selection like C# and VB.NET. I don't believe they ever fixed that, and I can't remember if it's the same way in 2019. You can't win em all I suppose though. :)

sandworm101 7y ago

>> MS has always been a really developer-friendly company Try developing anything for their gaming devices.

ptero 7y ago

I wish MS open model all the best, but I think MS started seriously pursuing those efforts after it lost a lot of power during and after the dotcom boom. In the PC era, MS supported Windows developers (kind of) as they were seen contributing to Windows ecosystem and viewing others in a not to friendly way. Google for "Linux is a cancer", "GPL is a virus", etc. Power corrupts. The transition of MS to the good side roughly coincided with Google's divergence from its earlier "Do not be evil" side as it got a chance to influence people on a worldwide scale. My 2c.

danmaz74 7y ago

> MS has always been a really developer-friendly company I beg to differ. Microsoft historically saw developers as customers they wanted to profit from - I remember how much Visual Studio and MSDN access used to cost back in the day, if you weren't a student. If it hadn't been for the competition from open source tools, I'm pretty sure they would have continued that way. This was true even to the point of hurting themselves. The most egregious example I remember was not including any installer for Windows together with the paid Visual Studio - that was a separate package. I wonder how many millions of users got their DLLs and settings messed up because of this choice, and how much brand value Microsoft lost to Apple because of it...

tracker1 7y ago
MSDN is still pretty damned expensive... That is a significant profit center. They've also had a lot of free and/or open tools over the years. I learned C# with a big not MS book, and the command line compiler alone. In late 2001-2002, I was unemployed and it was nearly impossible to find work as a developer. I spent my free time learning the ins and outs of C#, and by mid 2002 was working FT again. By comparison, I also tried to get into Java, and it was painful. Not the Java language, but the tools. Getting a simple hello world in Java wasn't fun at all, getting anything more complex outright painful. I didn't pay MS a single dime. Through the early 2000's I did a lot of ASP.Net development. Both in, and out of MS's sphere. I used Castle Monrail on Mono in Suse Linux. I also used .Net in Windows. I built a standalone kiosk system on Suse that used an embedded browser for the UI via Mono and a Mono backend. I also worked in MS shops, where the Windows and MSDN licenses were paid by the company. I'm generally skeptical of MS. I was hugely skeptical of Silverlight. I don't like that MS doesn't have an official client for MS Team in Linux (despite MS basically having the best cross platform Electron tools) and generally falling short on Linux all around these days. MS tends to make their money when developers using their tools makes money. Historically off of Windows licenses, today probably as much or more so from Azure. Not counting Windows and o365. And while I would prefer to be on a Linux desktop/laptop at work, I do appreciate the work they've done with Docker and the WSL teams to make development for non-MS better overall. As to installers, there's InstallShield, NSIS, Inno Setup, Wix and a lot of others that have come up over the years. I think there was a light version of Install Shield with VSTS. I don't think MS has been nearly as bad on developers as you seem to feel. At least MS doesn't force you to turn over 30% of your income to them like Apple does.