Their tools have certainly gotten nicer to work with over the years since they embraced open source. I too work in a windows environment, and things have gotten so good with WSL that I resold my mbp2018 (13”) and bought a surface pro instead for my personal development.

Everything plays into Azure though. .Net Core is great, but it’s just a little bit better with Azure. VSC is awesome, but it’s really awesome with WSL and Azure. And so on, and the best part is that they’ve adopted things like python as first class citizens for Azure system services so your developers can build things that run on the same services as the powershell scripts your operations guys build.

I don’t think Microsoft has changed one bit though. They are not doing it to be nice, they are doing it because it’s the best strategy to sell Azure and Officr365 along with it. I don’t mind, I work for a Danish city, Microsoft had by far been the tech company that interferes the best into our business and operations models for 25+ years. AWS is learning of course, but when you’re deeply invested in office365 anyway, there isn’t a long leap to Azure. Especially not when the tools that come with it are good.

A good developer workstation cannot exists based on Windows.

I would say that depends on what the developer uses - Windows developers may well disagree with you!

I guess a fairly large number of developers would disagree with you.

There's an argument to be made for your original claim, but that isn't it

For you.

Lol. Tell me all the good things about Windows for developers starting with automating the install and packages for setting up a new workstation.

I'm not going to convince you given that you've spammed this thread with negative comments but perhaps do a bit more research before making blanket statements about Windows, developers and what can and cannot be done.

Also, for a long time, all a .net dev needed was Visual Studio, so setting up a workstation for a developer was really, really simple.

how is that any different than setting up a linux workstation?

Half the guys I know keep a bash file and all their vi configs on the cloud so they can move them over.

Honestly, when I did windows dev ~2008-2012 it was friggin -easy-. It literally "just worked". Way more so than osx obliterating it's compiler every update.

Well, for starters with Linux you can automate the packaging like most distributions do to include the latest packages. With Windows you basically have to clone an existing install leaving behind a bunch of junk. With Windows you are stuck using ADK and cannot include software without building complicated packages where you have to monitor all the changes made to the registry and file system. This process on Windows takes a lot of time vs Linux which includes it by default. There is a reason that Tor recommends Tails and not Windows as well for privacy and ephemeral operating systems.