I doubt that many developers saw having a Windows machine as an impediment to building apps. Microsoft does still have 90% market share in PCs.

What's the marketshare on developer machines though? And build servers? What about Docker?

It's so nice to be able to have any CI build your Android apps and Travis CI supports building iOS apps, too.

As I said in another post, you can get a hosted build server from Visualstudio.com (VSTS) with unlimited Git repos, with 5 users and a hosted build server with 240 minutes per month. You can get a hosted build server with unlimited minutes for $40 a month. If you need more than one simultaneous build - buy more build agents.

VSTS has hosted build servers for Windows, IOS, Linux, and Android.

It's even nicer not to have to maintain servers at all.

I try to avoid maintaining servers. We are moving to serverless functions with Lambda and serverless Docker with AWS Fargate.

Pretty much the same regarding developer machines.

Besides my stay at research institutes, I never worked on companies where IT allowed anything other than Windows as development machines.

Linux when required is only VM based or servers accessed via ssh.

Macs are only allowed on macOS/iOS related projects.

Docker remains a buzzword for the majority of customers, another box to tick besides big data and ML on slideware.

I wouldn't go that far. I often see cited that 60%+ Of commits on Github come from Macs.

Github is a very lousy metric to measure anything relevant to typical enterprise development.

Even modern "Enterprise Development" is mostly web based. Few companies these days are developing WinForm apps.

So what, we are doing it on Windows laptops and no one is ever allowed to touch Github beyond getting stuff out of there to spare money on licenses.

So no, Githib is not a metric for enterprise development.

And you are right Winforms is legacy, all modern Windows applications are written in WPF.

I have been doing it the last 4 years, and dispite the HN Web bubble, out there in the enterprise there are companies actually adopting UWP and migrating their laptop fleet to Windows 10.

It's not about the "HN Web Bubble". I'm on the opposite coast and keep my eye on the job market. There are relatively few jobs for WPF compared to web - even in the enterprise market. Most internal apps these days are web based because of ease of deployment, and TCO. No one wants to maintain a bunch of PCs with the only alternative being a bunch of Citrix Terminals when they can use a web browser.

The writing is on the wall - not even MS is falling over itself to support WPF in .Net Core.

So come to Europe. Plenty of WPF jobs here.

Not everyone is using Citrix, and there are many markets, like life sciences, ticketing systems, factory management and many other domains, using non networked devices with native UIs in WPF.

Of course MS is not supporting WPF on .NET Core, they already announced XAML Standard and Xamarin.Forms is going to support Linux and macOS as well.

Also they have big UI announcement planned for BUILD as discussed on .NET Rocks interview with Scott Hunter.

MSFT pitched our team on paying us to make Windows mobile apps and since we only did iOS/Android/web on Mac it would have required us buying new Windows systems for most of the team. My recollection from doing Windows development in 2000's was having to pay thousands of dollars per year for the MSDN/VC++. This is in addition to looking at the Windows phone market realistically and thinking - these apps for hire for Microsoft are going to be the only apps we would ever make for Windows mobile. We would definitely have done it if we had Windows developer systems ready to go.

You don't have to pay anything to develop on Windows. Visual Studio Community Edition is free. Even if you want the professional edition - I don't see any reason you would - it's $499 per seat.

You also wouldn't have to buy Windows computers - you could either buy Windows + Parallels or spend about $60 a month and get a hosted Windows desktop on AWS.

You can get a hosted build server via Visual Studio Online - unlimited private git repos, 5 users free (each additional user $5). 240 build minutes free per month or $40 per hosted build agent with unlimited minutes.

If you really have no need for Windows machines, just use AWS Workspaces and you can get a 4 vcpu 16GB Hosted Windows workstation for $70 a month.

You're not allowed to use Visual Studio Community Edition to develop commercial programs.

> An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects. For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to five users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or >$1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/community/

If you have 5 or fewer developers and you have less than 250 PCs and you have less than $1 million in revenue you can use the VS Community.

Also to be completely accurate, this would have been in 2012 when the free version was Visual Studio Express and that was free for commercial use.

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/f280e5b7-f17a...

In today's world -i.e. not for Windows Phone - I would probably not even bother with VS 2017 Professional for a two or three month project. I would just use JetBrains Rider (Macs/Windows/Linux) for $35 a month and use .Net Core and develop on the Mac.

If you really don't want to spend any money today, you could use Visual Studio Code on Macs, Windows, Linux.

Your summary does not accurately reflect what the license states.

You can use Visual Studio Community Edition for commercial programs, so long as:

* You're not doing so for an organization that has more than 250 PCs or 1 million USD in annual revenue

* No more then 5 users in the organization that you are using it for are using it for things other than open source, academic research, and classroom learning

Was it this way when Windows Phone was starting? I think the free Visual Studio came much later.

Yes.

You could use Visual Studio Express.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2012/10/30/int...

Remember that you needed Windows 8 or later to run the SDK. I doubt many professionals who use their computer to get work done would trade Windows 7 for that garbage.

thats only true for windows 10 i think. I've made apps for wp7 and wp8 on w7

Even with the "Blend" UI designer (or whatever it was called)?

I tried to get into Windows Phone 8 development back in 2014 but couldn't as every SDK seemed to require Windows 8.

Apple requires a Mac for iOS development so my guess would be that most app developers use a Mac.

And if MS was that desperate, I'm sure they would have been willing to throw in a few Windows licenses to allow the companies to either use Boot Camp or a VM.

They were priming the app pump at the same time they were charging $100 for dev accounts, it wasn't something that came later.