They've made substantial efforts and improvements, so credit where credit is due. I think the broader .Net community needs to pull their thumbs out and take a hard look at why C# OSS has struggled the way it has, and how the ecosystem should be maturing.
The cross-platform, OSS-friendly, orientation of the F# community has been much more reflective of my technical concerns, platforms, desires, and predelictions.
So Google and Amazon should be scrambling to perfect the deployment plugins for VS. True, microsoft is SELLING (some editions of) VS - but there I'm sure they weigh both demand from customers AND the potential earnings. If AWS and Azure features are equally in demand, of course they will focus on their Azure features first because they have benfits for Ms.
The built in support for GitHub is fine, so you can stop moaning about VSTS.
Also, you don't have to use azure or SQL server. You can close those tools and, poof, it's done.
One of the more ironic things is that there's a growing dissatisfaction with MS precisely because they're making it more flexible.
Lots of people just want stuff that works with no config, no mucking around with command line tools.
That MS are proudly going 'run dotnet blah' is actually, in a lot of ways, a bad thing. Why can't I just click a button, and why clutter tutorials with lots of pointless command lines?
The 'no hassle, no fucking around with shitty console tools' programming alternative is going away.
That's a pretty easy ask.
However, my main complaint is not that they advertise their own products, which is absolutely fine, but the way how it is done is starving the .NET community from anything else but Microsoft. The way how all their .NET products are extremely tightly linked to a point where wanting to use something else but Azure or VSTS becomes almost unnaturally difficult, which is what I really dislike. For example, if I look at a nodejs product then I see documentation for all various integration points, with AWS, GC, Azure, etc., but when I look at a Microsoft library there is no documentation or integration points out of the box but Azure and that has a ripple effect on the rest of the community. Every library author only builds their tools optimised for Azure and don't even think about what else there is, which is quite upsetting.