The Microsoft you remember is at a time when dev tools were "the future". They are now the past. Microsoft's ruthlessness is no doubt focused elsewhere now. For example, do they go out of their way to make your code portable b/w Azure and Google? Probably not.
Re:Rust/WinRT Public Preview
by CodeM0nkey on Thursday April 30, 2020 @07:13PM
(#23037362)
Off the top of my head here are three different offerings from Microsoft that enable cross cloud applications:
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-arc/
- https://dapr.io/
- https://keda.sh/
The runtime for their serverless functions is also open source and (I guess) fairly portable: https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-host
And Microsoft, as crazy as it sounds to me, kinda is when it comes to cool dev stuff.
We'll have to see if they have really changed or just waiting to regain ground and going back to the extinguish part.
But what I can confidently say is that, of all the BigCorps, Microsoft is the only one actively trying to make developer's life easier.
Apple is consumer first, so MacOS is getting harder and harder to hack on, for better and worse.
Chromebook was never a serious competitor. And Linux is Linux, hackable to a fault.
But Windows… which I have always despised, is, for the first time in my life, tantalizing… to some extent.