Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

I was at Microsoft when Nadella took over Azure but I left before he became CEO.

While it's true that Microsoft was taking steps to open source products under Ballmer, it was despite him, not because of him. There was an incredible amount of red tape, dragging of heels and internal fear uncertainty and doubt. Even internal only projects to synchronize open source practices among divisions were an uphill battle. If anybody deserves credit for Microsoft's open source efforts at that time, it's Sam Ramji who should get the credit, not Ballmer.

From the outside, Microsoft under Nadella has all the stops removed. This all lines up with a quote that I heard from Nadella 3rd hand: "We [Microsoft] can either push the 'One Microsoft' vision, or we can make money."

> VS is the only tolerable language-dedicated IDE

Jetbrains?

Did you try wine?

I prefer it to atom already on OSX.

* handles multiple files well. atom ends up being too many tabs with no quick way to get to them

* MRU file switching

* shows side by side default v user settings

* launches must faster (which is strange since it is based on electron)

* JS debbuger

Can't wait to try the CoreCLR.

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).