4 ms·
There are two Microsofts. The first one is extremely developer-friendly, and regularly pushes out superb, high-quality tools and frameworks—many of which are f
by delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
There are two Microsofts.
The first one is extremely developer-friendly, and regularly pushes out superb, high-quality tools and frameworks—many of which are free of charge and open-source—and gives nice deep dives into tech. They also develop pretty interesting alternatives to the UNIX ecosystem. Some examples:
- the .NET ecosystem and languages (VB.NET, C#, F#);
- PowerShell (technically this is also a .NET language, but it has made Windows scripting so easy that it deserves a mention on its own);
- ASP.NET Core (again, part of the .NET ecosystem, but it is very far ahead of almost all other web backends (in terms of functionality, performance, and ease-of-development) that it also deserves a separate mention)
- TypeScript;
- Visual Studio Code;
- Visual Studio Community, the MSVC C++ STL, and the MSVC compiler, `cl.exe`;
- Direct3D and DirectXMath;
- WSL
- the Windows API, the Windows driver model, and the Windows ACL model.
Many more that I can't recall off the top of my head.
And there's the pain-in-the-arse, bean-counting Microsoft that justifies adding advertisements, crapware, and generally enshittifying what used to be a superb OS, pushing for software-as-a-service, changing the UX of Office programs every version, not being able to settle on and develop one nice unified UI toolkit for Windows, and (probably therefore) pushing laggy Electron apps like the XBox store, Teams, etc over well-programmed native/.NET ones.
I use and develop on Windows because I grew up on it. I don't want 'an OS as an IDE'. I want an IDE that does an IDE's job well, and I haven't found anything better than Visual Studio's debugger and profiler.
I am torn. Linux is still broken for even slightly edge-case use cases (laptop + monitor of very different pixel densities, and hence different scaling ratios; both X and Wayland fail horribly at this whereas Windows eats it up in a heartbeat). I game regularly and am not keen on virtualising or using Wine/Proton (I am convinced there is a performance drop in the general case), and MacOS is a non-starter for me.