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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

MS has always been a really developer-friendly company (which is not the same as an open source friendly company).

Small tweaks to that model, coupled by really solid products that everyone can use since they're free and open source (like TypeScript and VS Code), make it easy to bring that developer-friendliness to the masses.

And the substantive move of making .NET open source with the apache license (and .NET core)x really opened up yet another solid technology to the masses that didn't want to run Windows.

Kudos to them.

Update: before people pounce on me, I mean they're developer friendly to developers in their ecosystem. .NET has had the best docs and tutorials and improvements for many years.

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> MS has always been a really developer-friendly company

I beg to differ. Microsoft historically saw developers as customers they wanted to profit from - I remember how much Visual Studio and MSDN access used to cost back in the day, if you weren't a student. If it hadn't been for the competition from open source tools, I'm pretty sure they would have continued that way.

This was true even to the point of hurting themselves. The most egregious example I remember was not including any installer for Windows together with the paid Visual Studio - that was a separate package. I wonder how many millions of users got their DLLs and settings messed up because of this choice, and how much brand value Microsoft lost to Apple because of it...

The two are not mutually exclusive, and Microsoft had to worry about antitrust action if they priced their tools too low or made them free.

MSDN is still pretty damned expensive... That is a significant profit center. They've also had a lot of free and/or open tools over the years.

I learned C# with a big not MS book, and the command line compiler alone. In late 2001-2002, I was unemployed and it was nearly impossible to find work as a developer. I spent my free time learning the ins and outs of C#, and by mid 2002 was working FT again. By comparison, I also tried to get into Java, and it was painful. Not the Java language, but the tools. Getting a simple hello world in Java wasn't fun at all, getting anything more complex outright painful.

I didn't pay MS a single dime. Through the early 2000's I did a lot of ASP.Net development. Both in, and out of MS's sphere. I used Castle Monrail on Mono in Suse Linux. I also used .Net in Windows. I built a standalone kiosk system on Suse that used an embedded browser for the UI via Mono and a Mono backend.

I also worked in MS shops, where the Windows and MSDN licenses were paid by the company. I'm generally skeptical of MS. I was hugely skeptical of Silverlight. I don't like that MS doesn't have an official client for MS Team in Linux (despite MS basically having the best cross platform Electron tools) and generally falling short on Linux all around these days.

MS tends to make their money when developers using their tools makes money. Historically off of Windows licenses, today probably as much or more so from Azure. Not counting Windows and o365.

And while I would prefer to be on a Linux desktop/laptop at work, I do appreciate the work they've done with Docker and the WSL teams to make development for non-MS better overall.

As to installers, there's InstallShield, NSIS, Inno Setup, Wix and a lot of others that have come up over the years. I think there was a light version of Install Shield with VSTS. I don't think MS has been nearly as bad on developers as you seem to feel.

At least MS doesn't force you to turn over 30% of your income to them like Apple does.

> Microsoft historically saw developers as customers they wanted to profit from

I think that's exactly why they've tended to be so developer-friendly.

Historically, there have been three categories of dev tool producers. There were the IBMs and friends, who packaged the dev tools as freebies baked into a product that was mostly marketed toward business folks, and only made life good for developers to the extent that the business folks demanded it. There were companies like Microsoft and Borland, who sold more directly to developers, and therefore put out some really nice, productive dev tools for those who could afford them. And there are the open source projects, which are by and for developers, and are therefore also generally quite nice as long as you don't mind the things that aren't fun to work on in your spare time being kind of janky.

Microsoft falling into category #2 does not make them inherently evil. Nor does it morally obligate them to market toward hobbyists. The prices they charged were high, but not unreasonable for corporations, especially given the level of support that tended to come with those packages.

Apple falling into something more akin to category #1 doesn't make them inherently good, either. It's just a part of their product strategy as a for-profit company. Besides, does anyone actually like working in XCode? Like all cost center-produced software, it's kind of famously flaky.

To be fair, I think Microsoft considered Installers a Windows "bug" for many years.

Installers have always been a problem on Windows and Microsoft has always treated it as the unfortunate problem child it was. A lot of guidance from Microsoft has been "avoid Installers [because you shouldn't need Registry settings, shouldn't be putting things in C:\Windows\System32, etc] and don't use things that need Installs, but if you do need an installer, here's MSI which is super complex, not least of which because the preferred tool to build MSI has only recently changed to an XML-based build tool from a crufty collection of worse command line tools and direct binary manipulation".

Then Microsoft tried too fast to move everyone to AppX as the One True Installer. But they forgot backwards compat and the slow pace of Enterprise. So now they are working to turn the ship on AppX with the rebrand/rebuild to MSIX (now with Windows 7+ support in preview), and this time trying to get more of the Traditional GUI Installer Builders in on the game (so that Enterprises with InstallShield licenses dating back to their VB3-based Windows 3.1 apps don't have to learn anything new).

MSIX seems to be a great solution to move forward with, but yes the road to get there has been really painful, and the damage of how many people are still using Installer Builder systems built only with Windows 95 in mind rather than anything more recent is a painful legacy that Windows will likely be hurting from for a long time.

> To be fair, I think Microsoft considered Installers a Windows "bug" for many years.

And that's the cusp of the problem. A really developer friendly company would have given a simple solution to a developer who had finished his product and wanted to distribute it!

They certainly tried to make things better at times, though, they just often didn't have all the answers or solve the problem for enough use cases. ClickOnce had some good ideas, but the implementation lacked some details and the .NET-only focus left a lot of developers out.

It's also why I find it funny that a lot of developers are so angry at Microsoft for the effort put into the Microsoft Store. They absolutely wanted to make the installer/deployment world a lot better for the average user. Sure, the Microsoft Store in its focus on trying to be the best experience for users hasn't always been the best experience for developers, but they've been refocused on developer experience the past few years, and the MSIX efforts really are interesting. Particularly because they've learned from the mistakes of earlier projects like ClickOnce. (I don't think a lot of people realize yet that MSIX already supports better-than-ClickOnce style application updating from file shares and web servers, bringing ClickOnce-style deployment essentially on par with Store deployment for MSIX.)

Ms for sure improved as of late. My critique was against the idea that they always were dev friendly.

The interests of platform vendors and developers are inherently at odds. Vendors benefit from lockin, while developers benefit from portability.

This applies to other OS vendors like Apple, Cloud vendors like AWS and GCP, and so on, just as much as it applies to Microsoft. It's a universal principle.

It's true, but Microsoft has also done a pretty good job of failing to lock people into their development platform, and seems to have largely given up on it. Does anybody use COM or WCF anymore, except maybe to maintain or talk to legacy systems?

It leaves us in a situation where it's hard to get any more locked into Microsoft than it is to get locked into Haskell: Sure, you can build up a whole lot of dependencies on libraries that don't have great equivalents on other platforms, and any wholesale migration is going to involve rewriting a mountain of code. But interoperability relies on the same open and de facto standards that everyone else is using these days, so your migration paths are exactly the same as they'd be anywhere else.

I agree. They really try and take care of their customers. I think it was the launch of 2017, and my team upgraded right after the release. (I mean like within hours.) We were having some problems with the upgrade and TypeScript (I think), and it asked me to rate it my experience with it so far. Admittedly, I was in a slightly bad mood and aggravated at the time, and I gave it a low score. They wrote me an email and scheduled an hour to talk to like 2 or 3 people from different product teams about what was wrong and how they could make it better. It's not often when a company does that.

Did anything come out of this? A lot of companies these days are into getting feedback but nothing never comes out of it. I feel like they have departments that collect the feedback and talk to customers with the best intentions but that data barely makes it to the people making the real product decisions.

Whether or not I did anything specifically, I can't say. It did get a lot more stable after a patch or two. I wanted to say that our main problem was it double reference counting the TypeScript files. I think because it was storing a shadow copy of it in another location and that problem went away. (Memory is hazy.)

I do remember complaining that F# was not an automatically included in the language selection like C# and VB.NET. I don't believe they ever fixed that, and I can't remember if it's the same way in 2019. You can't win em all I suppose though. :)

I wish MS open model all the best, but I think MS started seriously pursuing those efforts after it lost a lot of power during and after the dotcom boom. In the PC era, MS supported Windows developers (kind of) as they were seen contributing to Windows ecosystem and viewing others in a not to friendly way. Google for "Linux is a cancer", "GPL is a virus", etc.

Power corrupts. The transition of MS to the good side roughly coincided with Google's divergence from its earlier "Do not be evil" side as it got a chance to influence people on a worldwide scale. My 2c.

>> MS has always been a really developer-friendly company

Try developing anything for their gaming devices.

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