4 ms·

This was how the Visual Studio crowd inside of Microsoft described it until VSCode basically destroyed their business. :)

phillipcarter 3y ago
I wouldn't use the word destroyed - Visual Studio (Windows) has been a billion-dollar ARR business for a long time, and likely still is. The trajectory is certainly not in favor of it, but there's an utterly massive number of enterprise .NET and C++ devs on Windows who will be using it for a long time.
- umeshunni 3y ago
  The crazy thing is that - I worked on VS 10 years before you did - and it was at a (near) billion $ ARR back then. So, it looks like it has been a flat business for a long time.
  - phillipcarter 3y ago
    Oh, undoubtedly. When I was there the writing was on the wall -- it's got a decade or two more life to it, but it's long peaked on the ARR curve.
  - uxp8u61q 3y ago
    That's what happens to mature products. Not everything is a brand new startup that grows 1000% every quarter.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      It's more that Microsoft lost the cross platform war. .NET lost and electron won. They even use it (or their own WebView knockoff) for their own products now. So there's no more need to give .NET away. They just milk the niche market that still depends on it.
      - thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
        >> the niche market that still depends on it. That "niche market" likely pulls in billions of dollars from enterprises.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        It does yes but it's no longer a mainstream dev tool really. Which means there is no longer any point in giving it away for free to try and gain more mainstream application marketshare. They tried to displace Java but failed.
        thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
        >> yes but it's no longer a mainstream dev tool really. C# is currently #5 on Tiobe right behind Java: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ It is just as mainstream as Java and everything else in the top ten. >> They tried to displace Java but failed. Enterprises used to be either Linux / Java shops or Windows / C# / VB shops. Now both Java and C# are being slowly displaced by Containers, Go, and Rust.
- benbristow 3y ago
  Indeed. To use the new C# devkit in Visual Studio Code you need a Visual Studio/MSDN subscription too. JetBrains Rider's a bigger competitor but even then (at least at my org.) most devs have a Visual Studio Professional/Enterprise subscription as a backup.
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    There are alternatives though. I've heard somebody hooked up Samsung's open source C# debugger, for example.
atonse 3y ago
I don't know how good VS Code is now (with regards to all the features VS had) mainly cuz I don't code in .NET, but I still miss the powerful tools from VS that I had nearly 20 years ago (for C#), in Ruby, Elixir, etc (and some other languages). The amazing debugging, stepping through, etc that Eclipse and Visual Studio has, were leaps and bounds more superior to all the stuff that was lacking in the simple text editors. LSP has helped tremendously. And there are similar debugging protocols. It's kind of getting there, but again, nearly 20 years ago, I could start up a project and hit the debugger immediately without fiddling around with settings and googling around. And I feel the lack of such good tooling has enabled a whole generation of "print string" debugging (which I totally do now) because we simply can't easily run and step through. Is this other people's experience? Hopefully the debug world is better in Go/Rust land than it is in Elixir/Ruby land.
- notpushkin 3y ago
  > but again, nearly 20 years ago, I could start up a project and hit the debugger immediately without fiddling around with settings and googling around It's working in VS Code now, too. For popular languages, you just have to install the respective plugin (only TypeScript is builtin), but it's just a click on the prompt. I've been doing lots of Python debugging and it's pretty much a seamless experience.
  - atonse 3y ago
    Excellent. I remember C# support for .NET Core was really solid even 6-7 years ago. So for a large number of use cases, they have to be talking about retiring VS eventually too. This multi-process architecture (with language servers, debug servers, remote SSH mode, etc probably making much better use of multiple cores has to be easier to migrate to)
    - notpushkin 3y ago
      Yeah. Remote mode is a killer feature IMO (sadly the official implementation is closed source, and there's no support for Docker in unofficial ones – although coincidentally I'm working on this)

phillipcarter 3y ago

I wouldn't use the word destroyed - Visual Studio (Windows) has been a billion-dollar ARR business for a long time, and likely still is. The trajectory is certainly not in favor of it, but there's an utterly massive number of enterprise .NET and C++ devs on Windows who will be using it for a long time.

umeshunni 3y ago
The crazy thing is that - I worked on VS 10 years before you did - and it was at a (near) billion $ ARR back then. So, it looks like it has been a flat business for a long time.
- phillipcarter 3y ago
  Oh, undoubtedly. When I was there the writing was on the wall -- it's got a decade or two more life to it, but it's long peaked on the ARR curve.
- uxp8u61q 3y ago
  That's what happens to mature products. Not everything is a brand new startup that grows 1000% every quarter.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    It's more that Microsoft lost the cross platform war. .NET lost and electron won. They even use it (or their own WebView knockoff) for their own products now. So there's no more need to give .NET away. They just milk the niche market that still depends on it.
    - thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
      >> the niche market that still depends on it. That "niche market" likely pulls in billions of dollars from enterprises.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        It does yes but it's no longer a mainstream dev tool really. Which means there is no longer any point in giving it away for free to try and gain more mainstream application marketshare. They tried to displace Java but failed.
        thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
        >> yes but it's no longer a mainstream dev tool really. C# is currently #5 on Tiobe right behind Java: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ It is just as mainstream as Java and everything else in the top ten. >> They tried to displace Java but failed. Enterprises used to be either Linux / Java shops or Windows / C# / VB shops. Now both Java and C# are being slowly displaced by Containers, Go, and Rust.
benbristow 3y ago
Indeed. To use the new C# devkit in Visual Studio Code you need a Visual Studio/MSDN subscription too. JetBrains Rider's a bigger competitor but even then (at least at my org.) most devs have a Visual Studio Professional/Enterprise subscription as a backup.
- notpushkin 3y ago
  There are alternatives though. I've heard somebody hooked up Samsung's open source C# debugger, for example.

atonse 3y ago

I don't know how good VS Code is now (with regards to all the features VS had) mainly cuz I don't code in .NET, but I still miss the powerful tools from VS that I had nearly 20 years ago (for C#), in Ruby, Elixir, etc (and some other languages). The amazing debugging, stepping through, etc that Eclipse and Visual Studio has, were leaps and bounds more superior to all the stuff that was lacking in the simple text editors. LSP has helped tremendously. And there are similar debugging protocols. It's kind of getting there, but again, nearly 20 years ago, I could start up a project and hit the debugger immediately without fiddling around with settings and googling around. And I feel the lack of such good tooling has enabled a whole generation of "print string" debugging (which I totally do now) because we simply can't easily run and step through. Is this other people's experience? Hopefully the debug world is better in Go/Rust land than it is in Elixir/Ruby land.

notpushkin 3y ago
> but again, nearly 20 years ago, I could start up a project and hit the debugger immediately without fiddling around with settings and googling around It's working in VS Code now, too. For popular languages, you just have to install the respective plugin (only TypeScript is builtin), but it's just a click on the prompt. I've been doing lots of Python debugging and it's pretty much a seamless experience.
- atonse 3y ago
  Excellent. I remember C# support for .NET Core was really solid even 6-7 years ago. So for a large number of use cases, they have to be talking about retiring VS eventually too. This multi-process architecture (with language servers, debug servers, remote SSH mode, etc probably making much better use of multiple cores has to be easier to migrate to)
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    Yeah. Remote mode is a killer feature IMO (sadly the official implementation is closed source, and there's no support for Docker in unofficial ones – although coincidentally I'm working on this)