It’s a real question. It makes no sense that Microsoft would impose a hard requirement, they only need to make Visual Studio more convenient for open-source Linux developers, which should be trivially easy in comparison to any Linux embedded CLI toolchain.

If you’re Microsoft courting the open-source community to the the tune of $7.5B purchase of Github, and you are releasing the first Microsoft Linux kernel, why would you unnecessarily mandate the tying of Linux to a Windows toolchain, when you’re already going to win/earn a voluntary tie by competing on usability? What you want is developers voluntarily porting their Github embedded Linux open-source projects to Visual Studio.

New Microsoft should have a chat with vestiges of Old Microsoft.