> The Microsoft brand has been completely reborn in the eyes of developers over the past few years. The lows of 2007-2010 seem a distant memory.

Maybe in the eyes of some developers - for many of us who are still dependent on MS products that haven't been getting much attention (SQL Server and it's related BI tools), the lows are still getting lower. Sure, there's improvements in the overall functionality (with SQL 2016) - but trying to get bugs fixed (or even acknowledged) for anyone but a fortune 500 company is still an exercise in futility. Trying to get support via MSDN forums (as is a purported benefit of our multiple MSDN developer licenses) is a joke.

We're dropping any MS related tech that we can, because frankly it feels like we're throwing money away when we could be getting the same (or, most likely better) support using open source technologies instead.

I have connect issues that have been open and unacknowledged for going on 4 years now. Meanwhile, I have posted bug reports to open source projects on github and received responses back with 5 minutes of hitting submit.

VS Code is great, don't get me wrong - but the experience with that project is a far cry from the products we've PAID MS to use and develop with.

What exactly open source technologies will give you feature parity and better support than microsoft's BI stack?

Would love an answer on this one. I implemented the MSFT BI stack into a product for no other reason than we were already using MSFT. However, each time I look at OSS BI stacks I feel like I'm losing out on something.

There's nothing that's really comparable at the moment, so far as I know. It's not one of the pieces we've been able to replace.

Reminds me of the 5 year old bug to fix Intellisense completion mode in SSMS, finally fixed in 2016.

The Per-Core licensing cost for SQL Server and now Windows too is really a pain, and getting worse with more and more cores showing up in boxes.

We've got some servers that would be happy to putt along on 2-4 cores, but we're struggling to find anything less than 12 cores with our managed hosting provider - so we have to pay for the extra cores, even though we don't want to use them.

"Consolidate!" - sure, but we can only do that so much. Some stuff we have to deploy regionally for latency reasons, other stuff can't share hardware for PCI compliance reasons. We don't want to have production environments sharing with dev.

Why don't you just run a 4-core VM on your 12-core server and NOT share it with anything else? Wasting the other 8 cores would be worth the licensing savings.

> many of us who are still dependent on MS products that haven't been getting much attention (SQL Server and it's related BI tools)

What about Microsoft's investment in R and integrating it with SQLServer? Seems like at least it's a step in the right direction.

So, because the personal issues you have aren't being addressed, the products aren't getting attention? That's more than a bit of a stretch...

I get frustration with a specific bug not getting fixed. That being said, links to the MSDN posts you've made that have gotten 0 MS attention? Because in my experience, even if the issue can't be fixed, someone at least responds letting you know they're looking into it.

Further, if you're paying for support, I've never had a bug go completely unaddressed.

I don't get the end game though, what is the strategy?

Ultimately, if you end up using Linux .net core + typescript, they seem to be killing off visual studio, IIS, Windows Server, etc.

For what? Azure, glorified hosting that might end up a race to the bottom vs AWS & GCE? Selling SQL server licences?

I just don't get the strategy. I'm genuinely asking, where is this actually taking them apart from burning a bunch of money making free tools? Why are they making .Net core?

IMO the long term strategy is Enterprise Javascript on one hand and Azure on the other one.

Azure is the obvious one.

Enterprise Javascript is basically:

1. Javascript is probably the most popular programming language at the moment (or at least top 3).

2. Since the creation of Node Javascript has entered the realm of back end services applications.

3. There's a lot of Javascript being written these days, and those lines of code will have to be maintained.

4. A large enterprise will need good tools from a solid, respected vendor, preferably one that has a great image in the developer community.

5. These tools, Open Source but beefed up with enterprise extensions, will cost $$$.

Microsoft was losing the back end completely, on the long term. It has already lost the frond end: web, Android, iOS. Now it's clawing its way back with its back end stacks or at least with tools meant for Open Source stacks.

Mark my words, after this huge flurry of development to mark Visual Studio Code as the leading cross platform "light IDE" (ahead of Sublime, Atom and maybe even ahead of some "heavy IDEs" such as Eclipse or Netbeans), Microsoft will release proprietary extensions, especially things targeting big enterprises.

In my eyes, this is a win-win situation. Microsoft still makes money, developers don't get EEEd like in the bad old 90s, etc.

>> There's a lot of Javascript being written these days, and those lines of code will have to be maintained.

Maintained and supported. How many JS libraries have developers jumped on, only to see them die a few years later? Backbone JS is the first that comes to mind.

Everybody was using it, but since then, it's pretty much fallen by the wayside and there is still a ton of Backbone code out there that needs maintaining until those projects can transition to something else.

Having a larger enterprise company maintain a library like Typescript when you know its going to be stable and maintained for some time as opposed to a smaller library where the creator just decides to pack it up and leave everybody hanging just seems like a smarter move to me.

Is it dead? Last GH commit shows as 7 days ago? (genuine Q, wondering if I missed something).

It may be less flavour of the month, but that seems par for the course with JS frameworks.

The last few commits appear more about cleaning up some of the documentation.

I guess on Jeremy Ashkenas twitter feed he called Backbone "finished" in terms of API and feature set after the 1.0 version. When you look at the contributions graph, its practically non-existent: https://github.com/jashkenas/backbone/graphs/contributors

Add in the Google trends graph compared to Angular and React: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=backbone%20js,angula...

Then when you look at the other libraries in the ecosystem, its like a ghost town.

backbone.forms - Open Issues: 172, Issues closed in 2016: 14, Last Release: Jan 21, 2016

backbone.localstorage - Open Issues: 45, Issues closed in 2016: 1, Last Release: Jan 22 2015

backbone.paginator - Open Issues: 20, Issues closed in 2016: 7+, Last Release: Feb 3 2016

backbone.validation -Open Issues: 79, Issues closed in 2016: 1, Last Release: May 8 2015

So not only is interest waning, the creator has called the library "finished" with not much more in terms of features coming and the ecosystem surrounding Backbone has all but dried up. I would be hard pressed to say it still has a bright future.

Maybe the end game is the same as it always was: find the next profitable thing and leap on it? Microsoft is opportunistic. They were a major UNIX vendor in the '80s (Xenix); then they were married to IBM with OS/2; until one day they weren't.

Microsoft has traditionally been the one to get the hate for this because their moves were so brash in the '90s... But the other big tech companies aren't any better. Apple is a friend of open source and standards only when it happens to suit them. Google does lots of open source but they want to be the ones holding the reins at all tiems (Blink, Android, etc.) Facebook spends a lot of money on looking smart and friendly to developers so that we'd ignore the Orwellian pile of information they hold on most people. Etc.

Microsoft in the 1990s, had tried to find a replacement for DOS partnering up with IBM. Commodore had the Amiga, Atari had the Atari ST, and Apple had the Macintosh and their operating systems were better than DOS. So out of an advanced DOS project came OS/2 and then the GUI for OS/2. IBM had their own OS/2 and Microsoft had their own OS/2 as well.

Microsoft was working on Microsoft OS/2 NT 3.0 when they broke off from IBM, and then renamed it Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 using the Windows 3.X GUI. Microsoft also pushed Windows 3.0 and 3.1 that loaded on top of DOS. IBM had OS/2 2.0 that had WIN-OS2 to run 16 bit Windows apps. Then companies quit making OS/2 native apps and made 16 bit Windows apps instead because OS/2 could run them as did Windows.

The big blow to IBM was Microsoft's Windows Tax to OEMs, that is based on how many computers they made, even if Windows was not installed on the new PCs. So if someone wanted to install IBM's OS/2 or Next's Nextstep for Intel chips, or BeOS for Intel, they still had to pay Microsoft the Windows tax. This forced OEMs to preinstall Windows, because they already paid for it with the Windows tax.

So it was a combination of OS/2 running 16 bit Windows programs and companies not wanting to make an OS/2 native version, and Microsoft marketing Windows to be used instead of OS/2 by bundling it with every OEM PC sold, that stabbed IBM in the back over OS/2.

Yes, Microsoft in the 1990s were ruthless and even bundled Internet Explorer with Windows 95 OSR and Windows 98 that got them investigated by the DOJ for antitrust issues.

In 2012ish as a freshman intern at Microsoft, I asked Will Kennedy (then CVP in Office) how did he feel about people pirating Office apps. He said that they would rather permit people to use illegal versions of Office than have them use their competitor's tools. Essentially he was saying Microsoft would rather people use their products free of charge rather than using other products as it promotes Microsoft image and helps Microsoft dominate the workspace. Promoting VSCode vs Visual studio are not competing efforts - the two tools are solving different problems in different work environments / tech stacks. They're simply trying to branch out to permeate more of the workplace, and it's working. Now that I'm in a startup in SF, I look around and I see some people switching from Sublime to VSCode for our web/backend stack, who would never ever use Visual Studio (100% macs here).

Sublime, people still use that over Atom? Do you see more people using VSCode than Atom, or Emacs? What about TextMate 2, no one?

Which language do your backend guys use VSCode for?

I have used Atom for about one year and then went back to Sublime. I do mostly back-end web development, in various languages.

I believe Sublime is a superior product in terms of performance and stability.

Reasons for switching back:

1 - Atom has some long-standing bugs that compromise its usability (e.g. there is a bug where you basically can't scale down a window after it was maximised: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10720 )

2 - Atom is slower, you may think a fraction of a second when opening a file or doing a search should not make much of a difference but, when you are using an editor every day for many hours, it ends up affecting your productivity.

PS I liked VS Code but it's different enough from the other 2 editors that it would take time for me to become proficient with it. I especially liked VS Code's debugging features.

Yup, Sublime Text rules. I still use 2.0.1 at work (on a Mac) mainly for Perl and JavaScript. It always works, it's fast, doesn't ever crash. I didn't like VSCode that much (mainly have a problem with the toolbar on the right and don't want to learn new key bindings/menus etc). Also I don't use debuggers that much, so it's a useless addition to VSCode for me. Atom is a lot like Sublime in terms of usage, but it's painfully slow. It is getting a bit better with every new iteration though. I'm using Atom at home for learning new stuff, as Sublime's widgets are fairly different from the general UI in Linux (looks like an editor from outer space) and Atom tends to integrate somewhat better.

Have you used TextMate 2? Possibly the editor with the best integration UI-wise, also, easily the most performant.

No, but if it's not open source and multi-platform (at least Linux and Mac) then I see no reason to switch. That's why I probably ignored it, in fact; also why I keep checking Atom out.

Not op, but I definitely preferred sublime to atom. I have since swapped entirely over to vscode, though, and I have been using it to write / compile / debug Node.js and c# / f# dotnetcore backend applications without many complaints.

I went back to sublime as I had too many stability issues with Atom. You can throw megs of data at Sublime (if needed) and it absorbs it, Atom grinds to a painful death.

> VSCode vs Visual studio are not competing efforts

Yet. Little by little, rather than invest in windows-only vstudio, they'll enhance code until it's building all the same stuff as studio and then they'll announce how amazing code is and stop talking about studio alltogether.

When MS ghosts a product, you know what its future is.

I think the lock in using API or platform is no longer necessary. Their well-integrated services in terms of safety, security, ease of use and reliability will sell on their own. The most important computing battle is on the cloud - get developers to build their tools using MS technologies and then provide much better performance and integration on Azure. If open source implementation of .NET CLR is 10% slower than the one on the cloud, they are saving users 10% in revenue by running it on Azure. I believe Visual Studio Code was supposed to be a website. I think they may have figured out that the web isn't ready yet for such functionality and ended up with a compromise. I can see a future where they are going to include VS code along with all VS online services including deployment automation to Azure through a single web portal. All your software development/deployment/management needs will be taken care of by MS.

But, speaking from experience and lots of recent discussion recently here, Azure doesn't have performance or ease of use.

The very people using Azure are the people MS are going out to burn with all this focus on the new stuff, the people invested in their stack are getting heavily burnt by churn and the substandard performance of .net core. One of the great things about C#/ASP.Net is that it was improving constantly, they've basically put that on hold for 2-4 years while they try and support linux. And for what? ASP.Net/C# was basically a much faster, better tooled, statically typed Rails.

There was a discussion here of what all the HN startups were using the free azure credits for and the consensus was basically "anything non-critical, log parsing, azure is terrible". One of the GCE guys replied to one of my comments about consistent latency of 3-5ms between website instances and SQL instances on azure with basically "ours is much better, 100ns latency, we're now beta-ing SQL Server". With .net core MS have basically opened up the C# space to be eaten by AWS + GCE.

And the recent terrible re-write of Azure web interface hasn't got anyone's hopes up of improvements any time soon.

VSCode was not supposed to be a "website". VSCode is based on Monaco, the editor for Visual Studio Online.

https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor

It doesnt kill of anything, it only opens up Microsoft tech (and it's developers) to more technologies.

You can still use Visual Studio to build everything, and many will continue to do so, over VSCode. IIS is free. Windows Server is the only thing that they might lose out on licensing but they make it up with Azure running the underlying infrastructure. SQL Server is a great database and formidable opponent to the Oracle and other enterprise options while still being available for SMBs.

Meanwhile, many developers can now be introduced to the rich .NET ecosystem and run it alongside their other open-source/linux stacks, only growing the overall exposure and tools, applications, and revenue involved for Microsoft.

>Linux .net core + typescript, they seem to be killing off visual studio, IIS, Windows Server, etc.

Yup.

Kill it all- transition it to linux, put linux on azure, or build systems on azure profit / rent-seeking.

vsCode only exists because vstudio isn't multiplatform and never will be but they need multiplatform in order to make their slice of the cloud revenue larger.

They can make sure that VS Code supports Windows and other MS products, while Atom - for example - cares more for Mac users.

The installation, update, and packaging story of VS Code is so much more polished on Windows than it is with Atom. I gave Atom a shot for a few months (my employer has products based on it), but it had a tendency to overwrite my settings or completely blow away the .atom folder randomly on updates. And the performance on large files is pretty abysmal (granted Firefox has the same issue opening big plain-text logs, so it's not something that only Atom gets wrong), VS Code does much better.

And if you want to embed Atom within an application, it's great that they've finally updated to make apm use npm 3 so the path lengths don't exceed 260 characters. That's a dumb Windows limitation, but until Microsoft fixes it and enterprises actually update to the version with the fix then it's a fact of life. But atom internally still uses the old nested layout for the built-in modules, so you can't install "portable" atom in a top-level path longer than a few dozen characters.

I wish more companies understood the value of great products that people love to use as marketing instead of spending money on advertising.

> I wish more companies understood the value of great products that people love to use as marketing instead of spending money on advertising.

Companies understand. It's just that making something that people truely like is expensive, takes a long time and is risky.

Marketing (in many instances) is cheaper, faster and less risky. Also, it's something you can do with 3rd party providers who do this for many companies. In other words, it's a business problem that can be solved by basically throwing money at it.

Building something usually takes insight into the customer, knowledge on how to build the thing that people want and ongoing work at maintaining that thing that makes people so happy. All of this takes a great amount of internal talent, skill and leadership. If the wrong few key people leave, if the corporate culture changes, if the winds of the stock market and profits shift, this can go away. It's much, much easier to just rebrand your way into people's good graces.

> It's great strategic marketing.

Yeah, it's clear they're trying to "save face" in front of the open source community and become more developer-friendly (Bash on Windows too).

But I must say, ten years ago when I had to choose between Java and C# for a SCADA project I picked the latter because of the Visual Studio IDE which was already well above the competition (think Eclipse/NetBeans back then).

I'm glad they've brought it back for all open source software.

I don't think it's so much "sav[ing] face" as much as it is getting the message out they fully support open source.

The long term play is azure which is their big money maker. 1/3 of deploys on azure (IIRC) use linux images. Our startup got a huge credit to host on azure and we don't use .NET nor Windows. Competition is good.

They are doing it the hardway, every one is entitled to earn their accolades including Microsoft, Google or Apple. Is it marketing, change of culture or otherwise, given the increase of footprint of their editor they are providing real value to developers on non-windows platform in spades.

I wonder what I'd get from my Surface RT that I paid more than a pretty penny for a few years back. Would be nice to "trade-in" for a decent discount on a Surface Pro 3/4.