With respect to the progress made by some MS divisions (and the people pushing for it), it seems not all of MS is keeping up. For example, this was on HN today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167964

It's hard to trust that the currently good sides of MS will be allowed to stay good while other sides of MS are still behaving badly.

Thanks Scott, I have kept up on your work and blog and I wanted to say I appreciate what you do.

There could be many ways to undo the good things MS has done recently, and they are not perfect, but I am much happier the direction in the past year than I have been since the start of the company.

"A newsletter entry dated 26 December 2012 states: "MS [Microsoft], working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal" with the issue. "These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...

Noticed how this date is withing those 5 year of "It's a whole new Microsoft" mantra you guys chanting over and over?

Nonsense. The last 5 years shows that Microsoft isn't quite sure about it yet. Better? Yes. A "whole new Microsoft"? No.

Facts?

Except for Microsoft's lawyers who are still using patents against Linux. Same old Microsoft.

Is it even possible for you guys to kill the undead SCO monster now? At any rate, it's still working away.

It worries me more that Microsoft has a track record of abandoning developer tools for the next shiny thing.

I'd counter that by stating that I work on a .NET codebase that dates back to 2003, it still builds just fine in Visual Studio 2015 and runs without issue on .NET 4.6/IIS8.5.

Well, .NET has been around for 14 years now. There have been all kinds of worried predictions about Microsoft abandoning or doing evil things with .NET, but after 14 years they're starting to sound a bit less worrying.

Remind me what happened to Silverlight.

Silverlight was essentially a polyfill for back when browsers weren't very capable. I did a ton of work with Silverlight - streaming video, vector graphics, cross-platform front-end apps with back-end integration... all stuff that was pretty hard to do back then, but is now widely available in all modern browsers.

Also, both the JavaScript language and runtime were pretty hard to build reliable, performant apps in back when Silverlight was introduced. The JavaScript language and runtimes have matured considerably since then.

If it had been my say, I'd have kept it for a little longer than they did, but by now I'd say it's no longer necessary.

There were always two camps in the Silverlight world, both inside and outside of Microsoft: those that saw it as a way to make browser-based applications more awesome, and those that saw Silverlight as a way to get away from that yucky HTML/CSS/JS dev. I was always firmly in the first camp, and from that side of things I wouldn't take back a minute I spent on Silverlight dev - I got a jump on video, vector graphics, browser-based apps, etc., long before it was practical to do that in the browser. When those technologies hit mainstream browsers, great!

Note: Microsoft employee but definitely only speaking for myself here.

Silverlight was competition to Flash. Once the standards were far enough along that it was clear plugins weren't going to be necessary, there was no reason to keep it alive. Honestly, you should be happy that Microsoft killed off theirs and decided to use open standards instead.

Same here. I wouldn't be surprised if Xamarin died slowly.

That makes no sense. It's pretty clear that .NET is Microsoft's future, and Xamarin extends the reach of .NET.

Look at Winforms, WPF and Silverlight. They are all .Net and all abandoned. I wouldn't bet my long term future on Xamarin.

Silverlight is abandoned, but Winforms (especially) and WPF are mature products; I use the latter two (as well as Xamarin for Mac) in my consulting business to make good profits each year, and don't see anything changing except for better in this respect.

Yes, Silverlight has been abandoned.

I would argue that Winforms is now a mature technology and requires little upkeep, but it is still a part of the stack.

WPF development has slowed significantly, but still proceeds.

None of these are good technologies if you want to stay up-to-date. You could also write your site in IE6 compatible HTML which was quite mature but that seems a really bad idea.

That's not a reasonable comparison at all. Winforms is maintained. IE6 is explicitly deprecated.

And WinForms is never really going to go away as long as Windows is still built around the Win32 API.

I would call Winforms and WPF "mature and maintained" rather than abandoned. Especially if compared to Silverlight.

I can provide a similar list for any big corporation, including Apple and Google.

Hm, I don't think WPF is abandoned.

seems to me, the next shiny thing is what HN is all about

There's a difference between a news site full of nerds being interested in something shiny, and a company dropping an old product for something shiny.

This is exactly what pushed me to the Apple ecosystem.

Yep, now they show full-screen ads on the OS itself. Huge improvement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167964

I'm sure there are Officially no privacy implications here.

Scott, any word on the inside on whether Excel is going to ever get some major enhancements? The object model desperately needs an improvement, and the ability to write VBA with C# would be spectacular.

Not sure I understand. You've been able to make C# Excel Addins for a long time now (file new | office addin) and you can also write add-ins in JavaScript as well.

Sorry, I was referring to VBA macros.

Skype? Sunrise?

Such win Scott.

I look forward to that. However, after 20 years of bad behavior, it's not unfair to be guarded for a long time after that. Does cancer relapse? Does alcoholism relapse? How about the politics of Russia? How long did democracy last? I applaud your efforts. The road is yet long.

EEE only works if you're a monopolist. Microsoft in 2016 is so far from being a monopolist that they can't even see monopoly from where they are. Xamarin is just another tool, so it's not clear what Microsoft would gain from extinguishing it.

Today you can target all three platforms...

It's actually after 15 or more years of generally good behaviour. After the anti-trust case, Microsoft spent a decade under the close supervision of the US DoJ, as well as the supervision of the EU (with an eye to imposing large fines if possible).

I expect it's done things you (and me) don't like in the past 15 years. However, the same goes for Apple, Google, IBM and Oracle. Microsoft hasn't been the least ethical of that lot.

> judging by the downvotes, there's a surprising number of Microsoft fanboys here.

Seriously, do we need to lower the content level of discussion here to "fanboy" camp accusations, it's not productive.

Also, please review the guidelines:

Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't regurgitate guidelines that long term users know and deliberately ignore.

Please stop backseat modding. If you have a problem with a comment, flag it and it will be reviewed. Thanks.

teh_kiev was right, and reminding fellow users of the guidelines is fine. I wish users would do it more.

Indeed I was just about to post the following in reply to your comment above:

Please don't add meta commentary about downvotes and who you imagine downvoted you. It's against the HN guidelines (two of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and is invariably tedious.

The Windows 10 privacy issues really do leave a bad taste, and I will be sticking to Windows 7/8.1 for as long as I can. There is a reason there are free upgrades to 10 being pushed so hard, and it's not because they are feeling nice.

It seems like they are giving with one hand (open source to developers) and taking with the other (data from their unsuspecting users).

> sticking to Windows 7/8.1

Well, you know, you can't walk into the same Windows twice. (Unless you ignore all updates.)

Do you also use only DuckDuckGo?

There are different expectations for the Internet and the software that runs your hardware.

Windows 10 privacy settings and .Net as a viable technology platform from licencing and technology point of view are two different things, though.

"The different Microsoft" aspect comes from open sourcing the key technological components so migration away from Microsoft licenses is at least a legally plausible, and that people can indeed see what goes into the sausage.

From developers point of view this is a huge improvement and makes the .Net a much more appealing proposition.

Is a company evil? Does it make good products? To me, at least, it's not very helpful to mix these two discussions.

Well they did fire all their technical writers; they kinda had to stop writing those updates when there was no one to write them.

Nah, nobody in the open source community really cares about them. HN is heavily used by Microsoft employees - and they are legion. That's all you're seeing here.