This is touched upon a bit in this episode of .NET Rocks.

http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1131

What I took from it is that Microsoft used to make all their money from Windows and Office, but now the company is looking to transition towards being a service company rather than a product company. As a service-oriented company, restricting developers towards a single platform doesn't really help them, so ultimately it's in Microsoft's best interest to get .NET out there as much as possible so that people will want to choose their services.

I won't admit to "getting it", but what I gather is that Microsoft want .NET to be a valid choice for everyone.

Hey, glad you're listening to the show!

I think it's apparent that Microsoft has admitted the reality that the operating system just doesn't matter any more - and you're not going to make money there.

So it's all about services, and Azure is one of the sources of those services.

No problem! Thanks for making such an awesome show!

Getting it is easy. Even with very good support for .Net (C#, F# mostly) in Mono, actually developing, deploying and maintaining an application outside of Windows with VS is problematic by comparison. In the past I wrote a couple of web based applications in .Net that could readily deploy to Linux. Even then, deploying to Windows was so less cumbersome than getting mod-mono working we decided it was worth the cost of Windows Web Server (or whatever the 2003 version was called).

At this point, they want to do this with Azure services. Which is very easy to work against with very rich tools in .Net. They're extending this development ability to other platforms, so that hopefully people will choose to use .Net even if targeting other platforms in the hope that people will choose to deploy to Azure over other cloud providers in much the same way that I chose to deploy to windows a decade ago.

This doesn't even count migrations of existing applications, which may well be better off on Azure (in windows) with new systems under Linux. The past two years, I've spent supporting Windows applications where a next generation was moving to Linux (node/iojs). Right now I'm doing this against Azure.

Being pragmatic, I'm even using Azure Storage (queues, tables and blob) for migration data, which means I don't have to setup/configure/manage a bunch of servers to do these tasks. Setting up RabbitMQ isn't hard, but there's time involved. Setting up C* isn't hard either, but if the data is transitional (using azure tables to hold data exported from the old system, and queues to trigger import into the new), it doesn't make sense to configure my own server. After using these services, I may use them more deeply, I'm already using Azure Tables for my configuration settings even, so I don't have to maintain an etcd/consul cluster.

All of this said... while I am mindful of getting locked in, and do have a strategy for breaking out, and my core application data won't be in azure services... actually using them makes me consider using them more.

From my own experience, what they are doing is a legitimate strategy and far better than how they approached it early on, and may still be. I stopped attending .Net conferences/meetings about 4-5 years ago because they were turning into Azure sales presentations more than development presentations in general. This is also the same time node.js started to become a viable contender, and I started using it for web project client files (js merge/min, less etc).

Great. Because what we need are more service companies.

Yeah, we do. Competition is a good thing.

They're just planning to coast on Android patent royalties from now on.

My hypothesis is that winning over developers to use their platform will eventually result in more Azure users. I get the feeling Azure will be their one of their next cash cows, and this is one of the steps in enabling that.

Azure users and native app developers on the Windows Store.

With the free W10 upgrades for 7/8 users and a 30% cut of Windows Store sales, they stand to make some money. But they have to get developers back on their side first, otherwise the store stays dominated by garbage.

But aren't Store apps essentially built on the Win32 API? I remember an article basically saying '.NET didn't win' for that development. I could be recalling wrong, and I'm sure there are wrappers and such, but still...

Most of the WinAPI is abstracted out for Store apps as most will be using either .Net or JavaScript for their applications, with the latter essentially being extended/embedded web applications iirc.

I haven't paid much attention to native apps either desktop or mobile. I've built my career understanding distributed systems/communications flows and web based fromt ends... To me most of that is a better experience than what little attempts I've made at front end platform development.

The current crop of store apps are in a more limited API. But as of today, MS is also going to be selling traditional Win32 apps shipped in a sandbox that allows for clean install/uninstall. Demo showed Photoshop Elements.

They're also supporting Objective-C now, with VS slupring up Xcode projects. Did not expect that one.

Azure should be. The price of running Azure VMs is about double Google Compute Engine VMs. And it's slower to work with, too.

Though I will say that Azure is all about getting you to use non-VM services, to generate lockin to their platform.

Interestingly, owning the market in developer tools and programming languages is how Microsoft got their start in the 70s/very early 80s. Not only is this strategy a reasonable one (at least to my uneducated outside opinion), it's starting to look exactly like the one they had before MS-DOS (and that eventually worked out OK for them, though it is still much less certain that Azure or something like it can play the role of DOS in this story).

Whatever it is, I'm not sure I've actually been excited about what Microsoft is doing since Windows 2000, and that's starting to change.

>Wow. I seriously don't know what to think anymore. What is their end game? Which platform are they hoping to become / remain dominant in?

The .Net plaform that's used by enteprises and devs also in the Unix/OS X world?

I actually tried it for about a half hour, and so far like it a lot... I don't know if/what plugins will become available. I do like that the side menu makes it much easier to show/hide the file directory view (which is indispensable imho). Also, the git integration seems very nice, I haven't tried it as I'm editing via a samba share to a nix machine and don't want to screw up the file permissions.

A couple nitpicks...

* There doesn't seem to be a way to set the file encoding... can I assume that files will always be saved in UTF8 w/o BOM? * There doesn't seem to be a way to set line endings... can I assume that files will always be saved with unix (lf) line endings? By extension, will this fix windows line endings, or mixed to LF line endings? * It would be really nice if there was an integrated command prompt, similar to cloud9's, that could be shown/hidden. Configurable to use a given shell (in windows, I'd prefer a git-bash prompt).

All in all, really nice work, and this may well replace sublimetext everywhere for me. I don't use any of the more advanced plugins with sublime, and I actually like the VSC editor's UI more. They seem to have burrowed the hotkeys from sublimetext.

You can set line endings on the bottom right on the blue toolbar right next to the language, where it should say LF or CRLF.

Thanks... do you know if files save as UTF8 w/o BOM by default? Most MS/Windows apps seem to set BOM, which is problematic in nix tools.

If you open a file with a UTF8 BOM, then the BOM will be preserved. New files don't have the UTF8 BOM.

> VS is the only tolerable language-dedicated IDE

Jetbrains?

Unfortunately there isn't a Jetbrains IDE that works pretty well with big codebases...

Windows is becoming irrelevant, Microsoft Office is being supplanted by Google Docs being both free and 'good enough', and worst of all, Microsoft completely missed the boat on mobile.

The Microsoft of old would have died out eventually. What we are seeing is not something you see often - a behemoth of a company doing a 'pivot'.

What would you do remain relevant in the face of the majority of the internet services not going anywhere near Microsoft for material income?

You're completely lost in your Silicon Valley mindset. Most of the western world still shows up to work and uses Office on Windows. Even in tech, I've seen non-technical workers request PC's just so they can use "real" Office. Office for Mac doesn't cut it. And while it might be good enough for you, it's not for many people who rely on Word, Office, and PowerPoint for work. Oh, and Google Docs is hardly free in the office.

I'm not saying this would happen tomorrow. Microsoft has enough inertia to fire all their developers and just sell the current version of Windows and Office for a long time. Hell, some 30% of computer users in China still use Windows XP.

After a few generations raised on smartphones and tablets without any Microsoft apps, Microsoft Office would just be a curiosity their parents used, like Corel Draw or dBase.

Fortunately Microsoft has taken note; there's rumor of Android Office apps, and the latest version of the Surface tablet is quite popular.

Microsoft, and in particular, Office is still going strong, but the stranglehold it had in the 90's is gone.

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Google may want businesses to pay, but going to docs.google.com and using your personal email address works just fine - much to the chagrin of IT departments everywhere.

Still he has a point. Kids will toy around with Google Docs but when push comes to shove when they're hired by PWC or Deloitte, Microsoft Office is where it's at.

Google Docs doesn't hold a candle against it while LibreOffice can barely sneeze in front of it.

I am very far from the valley, but we have mostly phased office out in favor of google docs. It turns out that easy sharing is the killer feature and that google docs really is good enough which will obviously differ based on what you do.

What non-technical users request won't matter, they will ask for whatever they are familiar with and complain if any icon is moved just slightly.

> Microsoft Office is being supplanted by Google Docs being both free and 'good enough'

I like Google Docs as much as the next guy or girl, but I find this hard to believe when we had to end a meeting several minutes into it when the Google Doc displayed an http-500-style error when trying to load a spreadsheet.

If you know what you're doing with Office/use the advanced features there is just no comparison. Office is the Emacs of the business world. But I suppose most people could get on well enough with Google Docs.

This is especially true with Excel and Access (and to a limited extent PowerPoint). It's insane how much business logic can (and often does) live inside some random Excel spreadsheet.

Word mail merges are actually a fully featured templating system. On top of the whole thing being scriptable. But I think this is less "discoverable" than Excel.

Linux owns everything else, but Microsoft still own the corporate - and home - desktop. Devs using Linux or Mac are not the majority of users.

I doubt MS owns the home anymore. The number from a few years ago showed college freshmen using Macs by 70%.

MS is still corporate-centric in the US, and popular in foreign countries where Apple stores don't exist in large numbers.

> The number from a few years ago showed college freshmen using Macs by 70%.

In the US, perhaps. Where I study, I can count the number of people owning MacBooks on my fingers. They're still way too overpriced/lacking in hardware compared to PCs at the same market rates.

Apple is also too expensive, by design, for 80% of the markets in developing countries.

Except the home desktop is a dying (or dead) breed - and many people will either have OSX laptops at home, or no traditional computer at all, only phones and tablets... They could choose Office 365 to some extent, but they could just as easily choose gApps.

Tales of the desktop dying are long in the tooth.

Windows is far, far away from becoming irrelevant.

A behemoth doing a pivot, but a pivot to what? And how are they going to monitize it?

Pivoting to becoming more service oriented. Azure/Office365 are their next generation core. Azure as a development target, which pragmatically makes sense as companies with Windows services/apps move to the cloud. And Office365 in the same vein. Not to mention them extending office to other platforms, which combined with Office365 (email) makes a lot of sense.

All of that said, outlook integration to office365 is actually worse as a mail client than it had been in the past with self-hosted Exchange. Counts don't update properly when you "delete all" from a folder, and even then it's inconsistent. I know it's to allow for better scale/resource control on the servers but it's still very annoying to say the least.

Probably, but the Google Apps sync tool for businesses kinda stinks too. What's better, besides self-hosting?

It ties into Azure services. As I understand it, you're not bound to Azure, but it's an easy path from VS Code.

I think they understand that the long run is not in platform dependency.

Actually it is... it's not too different from what it always was. In the past, it was about businesses running "Back Office" versions of servers in the office. Because NAS boxes are now a good enough option in small businesses, and many are moving their hosting into more prominent cloud services, they are positioning Azure to be the platform of choice for windows based services and applications. They've got Office365 to handle the mail server duties people lost moving away from back office. As a small business you no longer need to self-host anything (other than maybe a local NAS box).

I hate sounding like an advertisement for MS, but it really isn't THAT much of a pivot. More adapting to keep those parts of income that used to come from server licenses now as services. Not even mentioning Azure as a target, which is probably the best bet for keeping legacy apps running while transitioning/refactor/rewrite to new generations.

It's a good question, and the only answer I have is that when the old binary fortresses crumble you have to do something to stay relevant, and hope business opportunity will be found. I developed almost exclusively on Windows for almost twenty years, and then one day I looked at the cost of a universal MSDN sub and thought: this is getting nuts. So this is a great development, imo, because MS tools rock. I have been working in Ubuntu now for over three years, and in that time I haven't missed very much, but I have missed Visual Studio.

It's pretty simple, Visual Studio Code, the .NET Core runtime for Os X/Linux, ASP.NET 5 and TypeSript are only useful to do Web dev. With Azure they provide the best cloud to run those web app. So they don't lose any VS customer that do software dev, not lose much web dev VS customer on windows because the full VS will always be better and they provide tools for every web developer on other platforms in their area of expertise : development with code completion tools. It's a pretty smart strategy I think.

It could be as simple as them realizing "hey, that thing we've been doing for the last fifteen years hasn't really been working. So maybe we should try doing the opposite."

It seems like if MS just doubled down on Windows and Office they'd be in trouble if/when those stopped being so profitable and there are certainly reasons to think they're going to lose ground there (especially with consumer markets, but with business markets too).

This is decent strategy if the end game is eco-system around Microsoft technologies, not just windows but their whole offerings including Azure, IoT etc.

Microsoft is a software company , so i would guess their end game is not services or hardware but software. Anyone got any ideas how they plan to dominate the software world and make money out of it? They 've just gained a ton of new fans though, that's for sure.

Based on complete guess work - They seem to be moving up the chain by building and selling services on top of existing platforms. e.g. Azure on top of databases, Third party apps on outlook etc. Not sure what they intend to build on top of windows...

Yeah the real test will be, is this thing supported 5 years from now? There's a nice history of projects like Silverlight that get a lot of buzz and love early on but languish and are killed a few years later when management and priorities change.

Management in particular. It's unfortunate that new personnel always feel the need to push their own vision rather than the previous guy's, often just for the sake of it.

Simply the same as usual: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguis...

This is what worries me. What if we all start using these tools and then new management comes in (or if it was the plan all along) and poisons the well.

I seriously can't get too excited about MSFT technologies because

- they have an history of discarding products on a whim,

- playing the strategic game and stifling smaller competitors,

- having a new CEO doesn't mean it's a new company. The people are still there, there are still fragmentation and silos, and the attitude.

Keep in mind that this time they are not just giving away stuff "free as in beer" they are also giving it away not under AGPL, not under GPL, not under LGPL but under a MIT License which is one of the most permissive licenses out there.

Contrast this to Oracle/Java. Or about any other huge corporation.

Using a permissive license is the strategy that makes the most sense when your primary goal is proliferation over developer community. Thus, it's nothing surprising.

I thought Visual Studio Code was "free as in beer". Are you saying it's not proprietary?