what makes you think that? they killed off their own code hosting site in codeplex and moved everything to github. they are one of the largest if not the largest open source contributors in the world. and .net core is setting itself up to be a major player in cross-platform application development. it has a chance, if microsoft brings over uwp, wpf, and windows forms to .net core, to take over cross-platform gui development. with the windows subsystem for linux, windows 10 can run most linux-based software. they've developed the hottest ide at the moment on top of github developed technology.

i have a feeling they get it just fine.

You mention a lot of stuff that's in the same '.NET world' skellera mentioned, but the currently dominant GUI platform is the web, and neither is going to do take over. There's also still embedded software, hardware description, databases, emulators/simulators, competing virtual machines and GUI frameworks, a whole bunch of non-tech stuff, etc.

They do get a lot of this stuff, but I feel like whatever they want to do with Github is more geared towards average Joe .NET developer. Possibly making the platform less attractive for everything else through neglect.

The new Microsoft has made it clear that they want to support as many areas as they can. Azure does not have any lock-in of a specific platform (other than Azure itself in some ways) and Microsoft is constantly trying to get their tools to work in Linux and Mac. While they obviously would prefer you to be on .Net, they realize that lock-in ultimately hurts them.

Just give it a little more time. They are turning around years of company culture and they're doing a great job at it. If VS Code is a sign of future products, I'm excited to see what they come out with down the road.

Strongly disagree. MSFT is aggressively chasing the "open source"/Silicon Valley crowd, even at the expense of Joe .NET Developer.

Their main competition is AWS and GCP. Very different world.

not really. half the stuff i mentioned is all about the web. that’s the core market for .net core and visual studio code. visual studio code is certainly not .net centric at all. the in the box language support primarily targets web languages.

and i don’t get why you are mentioning those other things. what do they have to do with anything regarding microsoft understanding github? microsoft is no doubt and expert in all of those fields anyway, at least internally.

and what cross-platform gui framework would compete with a .net core cross-platform implementation of uwp, wpf, and windows forms? nothing, in my opinion. people would flood the .net ecosystem to get away from things like c++ and qt and the horror of writing script-based GUIs in python.

Since the Core era, not all .NET applications are built for Windows either.

Considering you bring up the second part, it makes me wonder if maybe outside of the obvious (owning GitHub), perhaps they're after the extra talent to bolster their SharePoint product.

Azure team gives a shit about "not invented here". They are exclusively interested in your cpu cycles and bytes in memory. Who organizes the cycles and bytes, they do not care.

Surely, there are preferred stacks (e.g. in the high level PaaS areas), but this includes node, python and .NET.

PS: one save bet: Java will never be on their support list :). But only for legal reasons :)

IIRC, internally Microsoft views GNU/Linux and GitHub as Big Satan and Little Satan, respectively.

Depends on who you talk to... I'm pretty sure it's MS developers that drove the integration of git repositories into TFS (many were already using git locally for local branches and commits with TFS repos). The move to GitHub for all MS OSS was probably developer driven too.

The Office team is probably more than happy to not be hamstrung to windows only. Particularly Office 365. Azure has been using a lot of non-ms/windows tech from the start.

I'm sure there's some in the recently re-org that used to be Windows still have issues, but the old guard is largely gone now.