I feel like part of the reluctance with accepting C# and .NET as fully open source platform, outside of the Microsoft ecosystem, is somewhat due to Azure. At the moment, the three main cloud providers basically vendor-lock you. There's no great standard body controlling cloud providers at the moment. Sure Terraform tries it's best to provide cross-provider APIs, but it's not the same as a standard. As such, most companies that pick .NET will pick Azure. Then developers are right back into the feeling of the old-school Microsoft proprietary vendor-lock.

I feel relatively similar about Visual Studio. It's pretty clear that it's a 2nd class citizen on Mac due to being build on top of Mono. Java apps built on the JVM feel pretty much the same whether on Windows or OS X. Mono on the other hand...it just feels like a monkeypatch. I think porting things from Windows to OS X is tough because OS X has so much foundation in UX whereas even new Windows machines are still behind 2009 MacBook Pros. This just makes Windows apps ported to OS X feel sluggish to me (and many of the features are stripped). Purely opinion.

I'm actually trying .NET Code and Visual Studio in a professional setting for the first time and I'm not hating it. WSL is what originally put Microsoft back on my radar and I'm starting to take them more seriously these days.

> I feel relatively similar about Visual Studio. It's pretty clear that it's a 2nd class citizen on Mac due to being build on top of Mono.

"Visual Studio" for Mac is Xamarin Studio, not Visual Studio.

The naming suggests they are the same, or at least equivalent, software, but that is not the case. They are completely different code bases.

Visual Studio has over 20 years of Windows legacy. There is no Visual Studio for Mac nor will there be any time soon.

Visual Studio Code on the other hand, being Electron-based, does have a consistent cross-platform experience.

> the three main cloud providers basically vendor-lock you

There's a wide range of lock-in you can build yourself into, or not. Services and features between Azure and AWS have a large intersection. Automation is where you typically run into the most vendor-specific stuff, as you alluded to - VMs, RDBMS, Redis, blob storage, media services, etc. are easy to adapt over multiple providers.

I'm actually loving rider. switched from vs code to it and couldn't be happier.

I still use vscode as my default editor though (lightweight + good enough vim mode)

Does Rider, or VS Code, allow you to build MSIs?

> monkeypatch.

Monoparche.