Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what you mean: MS has a history of abandoning its developer platforms and frameworks that thier developers have invested in, so much so that there's no longer a clear UI story for building native desktop windows apps, i.e. VB6, Silverlight, WinForms and WPF are all effectively deprecated. Although they have long support life, when they officially abandon a platform they also refuse to Open Source it so other…
> MS has a history of abandoning its developer platforms and frameworks....VB6, Silverlight, WinForms and WPF are all effectively deprecated...Likewise with XNA...CSF, WCF, etc... "Deprecated" is just a word that means absolutely nothing here since all of those kits are still fully functional on current versions of Windows (including XNA and the server side stuff that you mentioned). And VB6 is 20 years old! You wann…
It means everything, who want's to invest or be excited about learning technology they know to be end-of-life'd? Being deprecated is the first deathknell of a platform that begins it's slow-fade out of existence. At some point developers have to abandon the time they've invested into a platform into a new one that will be maintained in future, e.g. Cocoa/iOS/Android/HTML5/Chrome don't share the same risks of abandonment.
> And I find the lack of a single IDE built and maintained by Google to be sub-subpar
You're talking about your own feelings here, it's doesn't say anything about Google or their IDE tooling.
> Visual Studio is superb without R#, but even if you don't think so
Right, I don't, working without R# is a primitive experience that handi-caps productivity.
> at least Microsoft is making life easy by offering an IDE that is tuned specifically for the task at hand instead of using some open source pile of junk that tries to do everything
That's the exact opposite of what VS.NET is, who is the biggest offender of what you dislike. VS.NET is a kitchen-sink offering that crams in everything into a single IDE, it's the very opposite of "tuned specifically for task at hand". JetBrains platform-specific IDE's, Android Studio, XCode are examples of tuned IDE's for the task at hand. Even the DartEditor is tuned, which is more a rich editor than an IDE. It starts from a blank Eclipse Shell and only adds tooling for specifically developing Dart apps.
> That's a weakness because "cross-platform" means a crappy non-native Java UI
No cross-platform doesn't mean crappy UI, it means having the choice of developing in your preferred OS of choice, collaborating with devs on alternative OS's as well having the opportunity to host on the most cost-effective hosting solution. i.e. freedoms that .NET developers don't enjoy.
> but my main point here is that they don't put forth a very comprehensive strategy at all.
Exactly what IDE's have you used? Your perception of their tooling suggests not much. Android Studio is a very compelling offering and DartEditor actually provides a faster iterative experience which auto-builds on save and lets you debug app code natively from within Dartium in addition to the IDE.