This isn't your father's Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

This isn't your father's Microsoft

sawers.com

71 pointsmooreds87 comments

I think the pendulum has been swinging from Apple towards Microsoft for developer friendliness for some time now. This is definitely an active strategy on MS's part, and a huge misstep by Apple. Some key parts of the MS strategy:

- Embracing Linux. Beyond what's mentioned in the article, there's the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and the new Terminal app. Being able to run Ubuntu (or whichever distribution) natively on a windows machine, accessing the same file system, is huge for developers. The new Terminal app will make interacting with it even better.

- IDE dominance. Visual Studio (classic) combined with the .NET environment languages is very, very powerful. Visual Studio Code has taken web development by storm. A lot of what makes these two so powerful is Intellisense, which is extremely good at what it does. Compare this with XCode.

- Premium first party hardware. The Surface line of laptops / 2-in-1s / etc is at least as good as the recent Macbook Pros. They also innovated in an actually useful way (the detachable tablet on the Book), as compared to the developer-hostile "innovations" from Apple (replacing the escape key with a skinny phone, a universally reviled keyboard, etc)

I really have to give Nadella credit for the way this has all been orchestrated.

What changes here would meaningfully change the competitive balance? A macOS subsystem for Linux doesn't sound interesting. Neither, really, does a new IDE for building macOS and iOS applications. What's the real misstep here? The crappy Apple keyboard?

The parent comment just reads like an ad for windows. Having recently had the displeasure of developing on Windows, WSL is terrible and buggy. I’ve tried it on two different occasions and both times I just ended up going back to PS. That comment will get upvoted because hating Apple is so popular here that even shilling Microsoft will get upvotes when framed like this (I guess the “year of the linux desktop” memes got tired?). Apple still makes the best dev machines (unless you’re writing a .NET app), the keyboard is the only legitimate complaint I can see against them, but most people I know actually kinda like it. Even then, for that to be a deal breaker, you have to pretend as though we don’t all have our MacBooks plugged into two monitors and a mechanical keyboard at work (and have you ever used a Surface keyboard? Yikes...).

Man, I wish Microsoft was paying me, but I'm just a guy who uses OSX and Windows 10 (and Linux) regularly and doesn't have much of a dog in the fight.

I think the misstep by Apple was to focus so heavily on iPhones that they stopped paying attention to the developer experience on Mac. Look at the fucked Catalina release, the slow MacPro update cycle and the abandonment of the Mac Mini, the obscene SSD pricing (especially combined with the way Docker likes to eat gigs...), and yes, the shitty Macbook Pro keyboard and stupid touch bar. Lots of things that together add up to a poor developer experience.

Obviously, Mac doesn't need a subsystem for Linux because it's already a *nix and all the tools work there already. Microsoft was playing catch up, but they're starting to look pretty well caught up.

Now, this isn't to say Apple is doing poorly, obviously they make ungodly gobs of money and are usually the most valuable company in the world. My original comment was about developer mind share, though, which I think is swinging back towards MS after being thoroughly owned by Apple from, say, 2008-2016. By not making the developer experience a priority, I think Apple is losing ground that they didn't have to cede.

I just got a surface book at work and am absolutely blown away by it. What a clever, effective product.

MS has always been super developer friendly as far as I can remember. The difference was in the past you had to buy into their ecosystem and way of thinking. Once that was done, VS was by far the most superior experience. Now MS embraces a greater variety of developers, not just those who bought in.

Anyone remember DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS...?

EDIT: found a clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

How times have changed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5164635

> Why should I invest in the Microsoft stack? I'm done. Microsoft is no longer a platform I will work on and I will recommend open source products and frameworks from now on.

> The Windows tech hegemony is a graveyard. XNA. Silverlight. WPF. DirectX. Managed C++. C++/CLI. Managed DirectX.

What changed I guess is that they switched to embrace Linux full on. And now extending it as well. I trust that Linux is safe from extinguishing though - too much of the world runs on it, and free servers are just too compelling.

Not extinguishing perhaps, but appropriating and building upon Linux for their own benefit without giving much back is certainly possible. Google's already done it with Android.

Quite a lot of Google-developed code goes back into the Linux kernel. Look at cgroups - the entire containerization revolution sprung from code Google gave back to Linux.

Did that come out of Android? Google uses Linux itself as a desktop OS too.

Android hasn't led to anything like a mobile Linux. Google took Linux, built Android on top of it, and now owns the mobile space. Apple did something similar using FreeBSD inside OS X.

Microsoft could use Linux in the same way.

What changed is Azure and you can be sure they will do what they can to keep you locked into that ecosystem.

... like all the other cloud providers.

I don't play too much in the MS ecosystem but from what I read they seem to have moved away from the embrace, extend, extinguish methodology. Which is a good thing.

What would Microsoft like you to build? What is a modern Windows app in 2019? They seem to be retreating from even UWP.

Even better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gI_HGDgG7c

Personally I never found the heavy IDE approach compelling and I'd much rather just build up a Makefile than rely on what VS and co are offering. MacOS used to be better in that case because you had native POSIX on top of a machine with excellent driver support and good ergonomics.

But now the winds really have turned. MacBooks turned to crap, Windows laptops improved and we have WSL with perfect VS code integration. I recommend anyone to try WSL, install VS code, install its remote extension and then go to a git repo in bash and type "code ."

It's magic...

I have to add Git. They seem to have a dedicated Git performance team. I recently sent a patch to improve git performance, and have mostly been collaborating with friendly Microsoft engineers. Not what I expected at a first glance.

They HAVE to be passionate about git performance, more than anyone else. They run the biggest repo ever: the Windows source.

Give them a perf improvement and they will love you!

Most developers work for companies that go where the money and eyeballs are. They are both on web and mobile. No matter how “friendly” MS is, if you want to develop for iOS, you have to have a Mac.

The entirety of Mac revenue is around 10% of Apple’s revenue. If it does lose the love of developers, it doesn’t make a difference.

That being said, I’m mostly all in on Apple - the Watch, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, and soon AirPods Pro. But I don’t see any purpose for buying a Mac. My tooling and other apps would be the same and you have a lot more options at better prices on Windows.

Do any serious developers who are not already steeped in the MS ecosystem actually clamor to work in that environment? Half of the tools I use on a daily basis are not MS friendly.

But I would still endorse Apple over Microsoft until MS shows that it cares about user privacy by publicly distancing themselves from Facebook.

Plus, Apple stuff just works. You still end up being an unpaid IT support for MSFT when you buy Windows machines for your loved ones.

They care about privacy and still have a massive connection with China?

Idk but if you're willing to break your privacy for one state, what's stopping you from breaking it for another?

How is this different than every other company doing business in China, including Microsoft?

>Keep your data within datacenters located in China with an Azure China account and stay compliant with international and industry-specific compliance standards. Access to your customer data is controlled by an independent company in China, 21Vianet. Not even Microsoft can access your data without approval and oversight by 21Vianet.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/chin...

Did i say Microsoft is better?

I said that selling point for Apple is just invalid.

Actions that are legally required of every company doing business in a particular country do not invalidate their actions elsewhere.

Google, for instance, bragged on their blog to their real customers in advertising that they now buy a copy of everyone's credit card transaction history.

No nation forced them to do that.

Actually I think they do - if they're ever legally required to give up data here they seem to not really put up a fight, or have an incentive to make the data useless for the govt.

What I'm saying is expecting Apple to have your back sounds meh.

We just got two cheapish windows laptops after many years of not using windows at all.

Pros:

* Keyboard quality (compared to macbooks)

* Low cost

* Good physical design if you choose the right brand (thinkpad carbon for example)

Cons:

* Dark patterns push you hard to connect your account to a skype/xbox/microsoft live/whatever they call it these days account

* License key hell is still a thing

* Schizophrenic split between screens that work on high DPI displays and screens that don't. Sometimes in the same application.

* Too many versions of windows with features arbitrarily disabled depending on the version you have. Neither of these two laptops can enabled bitlocker, and no windows linux subsystem. Is all the code for bitlocker and wsl on my disk? I bet it is, just routed around with an `if version` branch.

* Crapware pre-installed

* Fairly crashy. On one if you put it to sleep with a full screen app open it wakes up with a black screen. Needs a hard reboot every time.

> Crapware pre-installed

The first rule of buying a prebuilt system has always been nuke it from orbit and start from scratch. Sounds like this isn’t changing any time soon.

Yeah, but even if I "nuke it from orbit" with a recent Windows 10 ISO I have to trick around to be able to just create a local account (disconnecting network or entering some form invalid three times, dark pattern stuff) and then if I finally get along I get greeted with a start menu full of candy crush and other crap..

Compare that with and Debian installation, quicker, no dark patterns, and no crap. Fedora works too, AFAICR, but Ubuntu has gone already a bit the M$ way, it seems..

Doesnt Apple push the same way to connect you apple id to your machine?

It's very avoidable, it only asks on first boot of a new user account.

The crash you are describing is a manufacturer issue, sounds like a driver preventing proper sleep. Not an excuse, just pointing out.

Also I wouldn't call think pad carbon cheapish

I think there are sections of Microsoft that are very, very good but crappier sections are bringing down company perception somewhat - the company vision is somewhat confused when they drop a cross-platform SQL server and then introduce telementry into Windows.

Microsoft Office, if anything, has gone completely backwards in regards to UX. On a fundamental level it 'just works' but when I started becoming more of a power user I found reproducible bugs, unexpected or inconsistent behaviors, and a complete lack of extensibility for creating / modifying docx documents programmatically in !C#.

By far my least favorite issue is the constant battle I have with locale - I'm not sure if the document creators local was set to EN-US or if my system config is not correct, but every time I try and force the document to EN-AU it seems to switch back seemingly on a per-section basis or something. The most amusing side effect of this is the 'Read aloud' voice changing gender mid sentence but the amusement is quickly offset by it deciding to auto-correct perfectly valid EN-AU spelling for its American localisation for the fifth time in a paragraph.

Word stores the text language as part of the formatting, effectively, and it can change mid-sentence. Spell check wouldn't really work otherwise in multi-language documents. So you probably have to select everything once and set your preferred language.

It also gets quite clever with detecting repeated formatting. Just like Word can notice when the part up to a colon of each enumeration item is bold and does this automatically, it can notice that the second column of a table is always the same language and can even change the keyboard layout accordingly. But overriding the language once for everything should stop all that, still.

The most brain dead thing about Windows, IMO, is that the keyboard selection is tied to locale. You want UK English but using a US keyboard (as you do on a laptop)? Screw you, it’s US spelling or a UK layout.

I find the keyboard layout switching really awkward but for different reasons. On MacOS/Linux, setting the keyboard layout is global - under windows it's per-application and the default is for shift-backtick to switch between layouts which is something I manage to hit pretty frequently.

When I was working on a host where I needed two layouts (US-Dvorak + US-Qwerty for other users) I ended up solving the problem using AutoHotKey to hook all keys and send a different keyevent. It was pretty gross but it bypassed all the issues I was having in a convenient way.

Perhaps you could hook US symbols such as "$" and rebind to UK equivalents with AHK? Alternatively, creating a modified EN-US keyboard layout which has relevant key-symbols would also work / be less hacky, but probably require more effort.

It's been global by default since Windows 10, AFAIK (and comes with a better (well, a) UI for switching as well with Win+Space. I've since disabled all the other shortcuts, as I've been hitting Alt+Shift far too often.

Huh? I’m using a German keyboard with en-US Windows without problems.

Nothing is tied to anything on Windows in that respect. Contrary to how other systems handle this. On Windows you have locale/culture (how to format numbers, dates, etc.) separate from UI language (what language menus, buttons, etc. should appear in), separate from keyboard layout.

I just encounter countless broken programs that don't really support that distinction (e.g. Chrome ignoring date/time formatting settings in its UI since UI language and locale are being conflated, some applications trying to guess the UI language based on the locale or even the keyboard layout (what thought was behind that, I cannot even guess). It's a mess, but mostly on the application side and probably because lots of cross-platform applications don't even know there is a distinction on some platforms (and gettext not knowing about UI language and thus using locale doesn't help either).

You can’t judge a company only by its shiny new things; you also have to judge how they’re handling what’s already there.

And right now, there are some exceedingly-common things that are far too broken considering how many decades Microsoft has had to fix them. I’m sure we all have our lists but just off the top of my head...

- The complete inability of an OS named Windows to remember where any of its windows were a second ago, after you have the audacity to plug in a cable such as a dock or external monitor.

- An OS that drinks laptop energy from a giant straw, combined with an OS that is poor at restoring state when the machine inevitably runs out of battery in your bag and has to be rebooted unexpectedly when you open the lid.

- An OS and apps that cannot handle the extremely common scenario of a network outage or even a momentary blip. I will be spammed with a half-dozen login prompts from all over the place as punishment for the crime of briefly losing WiFi, as network disks and other apps all lose their minds. The OS also cannot auto-close any of these prompts when I reconnect.

- Core UI elements can become completely unusable. For example, I should be able to click the WiFi task bar icon at any time, yet at some point this menu will just stop working (its icon still highlights when clicked but no menu appears anymore!). Text is frequently cut off to the point where I am required to hover for a tooltip to even see what the rest of the text says...assuming that a tooltip has been implemented.

- The OS still completely disrespects its users. Completely unimportant windows will appear right in the middle of the screen, blocking everything behind them, with no apparent way to close them or even move them.

Your comment regarding network outages is an issue on macOS as well with certain apps. FileMaker is a good example. Just putting my laptop to sleeps breaks its network connection to the FileMaker server I need to use for $Employer to the point I have to restart FileMaker and login to my $Employer’s system every time my laptop wakes up. I wonder it your issues is more to do with crappy apps rather than windows itself?

One of my first software roles was working with a legacy FileMaker database where most of the business logic was built directly into different GUI elements. I do not envy your work.

Certainly 3rd-party apps may have issues but it’s easy to encounter hiccups with just Windows Explorer (e.g. mapped drive letters popping up one message per drive on disconnect), OneDrive (login prompts), even Outlook and Skype. In the case of Outlook, it seems to enter a state of perpetual “exclamation point” after a disconnect that can only be resolved by forcing it to restart.

While this isn’t your father’s Microsoft, this is your grandfather’s Microsoft.

Before they started creating business applications and operating systems, Microsoft was in the business of programming tools. Their first software was Microsoft Basic. Microsoft Basic was available on pretty much every major personal computer platform.

Thus in some sense this is Microsoft returning to its roots as a cross-platform programming tools company.

To be fair, Microsoft Basic practically was an operating system, in its day. It’s what many computers booted into, and sometimes the environment in which everything else was run from.

To be fair BASIC was not much of a deal. The interpreter is just a REPL. Very basic at it, hence the name. The BASIC was not invented by MS: they replicated it. The real operating system part was done by computer manufacturers. For instance it was Dragon Data that brought the "kind of" OS routines in the Dragon32. Floppy disk managment, I/O, etc. MS just brought the REPL and ... bugs.

> BASIC was not much of a deal. The interpreter is just a REPL. Very basic at it, hence the name.

The language is named after its goal of being something easy to learn. It is a fairly contrived acronym, Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

.NET Core would’ve been really incredible had it come a few years earlier, but I’ve been too busy being enamored by Go and Rust to really consider it more. Still, it is very nice to use when I do use it. I am quite excited by the way it handles async. I had some issues trying to use debuggers under Linux due to licensing... a little bit of “old world” Microsoft?

I really don’t care for Windows 10 at all, and make a point of not running it on any of my machines (I am running Linux everywhere.) I keep checking and rather than getting better it often feels it’s getting worse. The fresh install experience is abysmal.

Is the “new” Microsoft really great? GitHub has been doing awesome, and I love Visual Studio Code, but as much as it pains me to say it they still have a long way to go. It feels like Microsoft, as large a company as it is, is in two places about many of these issues. I still have fears. Can I trust VS Code remoting? (It’s not open source, from what I can tell.) Hard to say. (I still use it, because it’s awesome. But, I have second thoughts every time. It’s hard to shake the feeling that maybe something is off.)

What do you mean by “it’s hard to shake the feeling that maybe something is off”?

Wondering why this bit isn’t open source. Is there really any point? There exists open source VS Code extensions and forks that do basically the same thing. It’s weird for the whole editor to be open source but for this part, admittedly very compelling, to not be. Something is fishy.

I don't understand people using VS crap. After all these decades being screwed over you just flock back like a bunch of..

Just shell out some cash to support a proper IDE company like JetBrains.

I have a Jetbrains Toolbox subscription.

"Maybe the Microsoft strategy is to intro into the Linux/Java/LAMPish/open-source camp community, burnish their image, and hope they consider their commercial offerings."

Try plugging a USB stick with an ext2 partition into Windows 10. At least in 1803, you get TWO dialog boxes asking you to format the partition, with the default being format! In between is another dialog box with just one button. This is the new Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft.

Are you sure that this dialog box comprehensively represents the whole company?

I remember working at a Microsoft HQ building, when they had "Linux is cancer" posters hanging throughout the building. Never heard any Microsoft employees complain about them.

Windows will always be Windows, and other systems will be second-class citizens to it.

The new Microsoft makes money well beyond Windows: billing running containers and Linux (or Windows) VMs, GB/month of Azure Storage, GB/month of outbound traffic, Visual Studio professional subscriptions, and so on.

It's a clever strategy. Managers usually won't care/understand about containers, runtime environments, Active Directory, APIs, libraries, etc., but developers/devops folks do. By addressing devs, Microsoft is getting quite a competitive edge (no pun intended) in the operational part of enterprises.

Microsoft salespeople already address managers in terms of solutions in manager-lingo (synergies, CapEx/OpEx, yada, yada).

To be fair, this seems not like a mainstream use case... and you can use WSL to read it if you really want to (which seems like an advanced use case anyway). Cross platform FAT32 is the standard and Microsoft made that open.

I think a token amount of effort to try to detect ext file system and not to offer to wipe it clean might have improved the user experience. Small things like that accumulate and aggravate.

There isn't anything "fair" about it; it is a blantant misuse of market share to make it harder to use a competing operating system. I do actually have a FAT32 partition as well that I use for transfer (the reason I'm plugging in the USB stick to begin with), I just also have an ext2 partition that Windows should ignore. I haven't used WSL yet, but if they already have code to read ext2 that makes it (slightly) worse, not better (unless you mean the WSL2 actually running a Linux kernel).

Microsoft would prefer to have a monopoly on operating systems, but to the extent that isn't possible/allowed a duopoly with Apple isn't so bad due to Apple's "premium" focus and special hardware. It is clear that the first priority relating to Linux is to prevent new Linux users. While they would love to have a better reputation anyway, I doubt many people will be fooled for long.

I'm kind of puzzled by this fanboism about "a new MS happening now". The new propaganda is along: "Hey! reset everything you know about MS. The new MS is shiny!". Why would anybody support MS without being a shareholder or without having any financial interest. Given their proven track record it would be pretty obvious to be cautious about MS. IMHO MS have all the reasons to be doomed. They are way behind technically in key CS areas: HPC, Mobile, embedded, etc. Their flagship OS is FUBAR due to 2 decades of accumulated bloat. Anyway we might envision a future for MS as a profitable business: Embrace 21st century standards, port their SW on *nix(es) and make profit on their core competencies: that is developing boring non innovative SW for big companies.

Exactly. Microsoft quite ironically they isn't a tech company, it has always being first and foremost a company in the business of making money - who just incidentally happens to hire some really smart technical people, who sometimes produce good products.

For me, windows 10 is still an issue. I don’t like being spied on. I don’t like disabling cortana and bing and sending everything i type to microsoft and having my choices overwritten every single update. I don’t like having to delete fucking candy cruah for the third time. Respect the very deliberate choices I made and perhaps I’d use it seriously again.

sending everything i type to microsoft

What do you mean?

There are several settings that will send many things you type back to Microsoft. They are on by default. “Getting to onow you” is one such setting. There are also typeahead suggestions, suggestions for handwriting, search box suggestions etc. autocomplete is fine if I am on a specific website or app but definitely not fine in an OS, especially when it turns itself back on silently after I disabled it.

My only real beef with the modern MS stack is the occasional forcing of telemetry and updates on certain products. If they would just quit doing that, without insane hoops to jump through, they'd gain a bunch more trust.

I propose universal opt-out environment variables (e.g. OPT_OUT_ALL_TELEMETRY=1, OPT_OUT_ALL_AUTOMATIC_UPDATES=1) that all software, not just MS's, should pride themselves in respecting.

The hoops you have to jump through on azure data studio is rediculous. It has a popup saying it is tracking you but instead of asking or providing an opt out button it has a wiki page describing a config option you have to manually insert into a json file and restart the program before it will stop tracking you. By that point it has likely uploaded all of your data anyway.

Yeah, I just went through that a few weeks ago. It's really user-hostile. It's like they know exactly who cares about that kind of thing, hide it perfectly from the users that don't, and then do a bunch of stuff to piss off the people that do.

Hadn't heard of Nano server at all. Kinda neat to see this entire howto guide is based on (power)shell commands: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/...

They do have a lot of cool new stuff but MS is still the same old MS. Tried doing some RAID driver stuff the other day on a Win 2019 test box and wanted to get hit by a train. I have spent so many years in open source land that I forgot how painful it is to get help with obscure errors in Microsoft world. Installing a fresh OS takes what feels like forever, especially account provisioning and unchecking the dozen (literally) trackers/cortana/etc garbage. Simple things feel slow. The UI is clunky, and half the stuff you use is going ot be using a circa-last-last generation UI toolkit anyway so it all looks out of place.

Please do not mention Powershell, this is a civil forum.

My wife still uses Windows (out of familiarity) and I have to fix her computer whenever there's a problem. I can confidently report that, when it comes to type and frequency of bugs, it is the exact same Microsoft it always has been.

I hate to distract from the content of the article, but I have a request from those without good vision: the text color on this blog is just a shade over 50% grey. I know people are opposed to the starkness of #000-on-#FFF text, but going approximately #888-on-#FFF seems extreme.

Just adding this in case anyone is using vs code and is wondering about dev on windows. I'd say that wsl is nice for some tasks but I wouldn't rely on it as a daily driver. It's great for installing some CLI tools to perform certain tasks. Maybe some file grepping or searching that you want to do with your local stuff but find it infuriating to do with powershell or bat scripts. This doesn't mean WSL is bad by any means. It's actually great. But not good enough. Not yet.

But I use windows as my daily driver and what does work amazingly well for me is virtualbox and running a VM as my developer machine on it. I run Ubuntu server. And for developing, VS code has this amazing feature that allows one to connect to a remote and develop on it as if it's a local filesystem. This includes having extensions that interact with the remote too. This also means I don't do the whole shared folders dance with all its oddities around speed and syncing anymore. Honestly, it changed the whole windows dev game for me.

Once the new terminal for windows is actually v1 (not holding breath for that. Theres a lot of work for that. Its probably going to miss the winter v1 projection) I think the windows dev experience will be complete.

I’ve used sshfs for remote editing for a long time.

I'm not really considering it for my personal stuff, but since work is a Microsoft shop, I'm really pushing to get on .NET core. We're at a point where most of our Windows bound stuff is going away and we can start to shed a lot of weight if we can port what remains to .NET Core.

I'm lucky enough to be leading a brand new huge project in .NET Core 3 at work. I wouldn't consider it for personal stuff either, but I love that the Windows devs at work don't even need to know I'm doing my work on Linux. Something will probably come up eventually but, 4 months in, no one has brought it up.

Once you get used to developing in a *Nix environment there is just no going back. WSL/WSL2 just isn't there yet. Too much "beta" software for me to rely on it professionally and things just don't work out of the box.

I don't ever see myself going back to Windows.

Other Microsoft products, sure. I prefer Atom but Code is a fantastic editor that has quite literally changed the game in web development. The acquisition of GitHub was incredibly smart. .NET core, etc.

They've made many correct plays over the last 5 years with the dev community - the problem lies in their core product...Windows.

I'm really curious about where Windows will be in 10 years.

We see MS making launchers for Android, and offering their products more and more cross platform (based on electron + web client). Even switched Edge to be Chromium based.

How long until MS makes a Windows launcher for Linux. As long as they can provide a consistent experience and offer their services, they don't seem to care so much about which OS they champion.

The one thing that has persuaded me the most has been vscode.

Until switching to that, I had assumed Microsoft incapable of producing something with excellent design/UX. Also it's open source.

Opening Microsoft software every day on my Ubuntu machine and feeling grateful they made it has slowly chipped away at my anti-Microsoft stance.

Man, I have such fond memories of VC6. It was such a great debugging experience. And MSDN was absolutely the best documentation website I've used. I think Microsoft's developer tools have always been high quality.

Agreed, they do have some of the best tooling. Damn, VB6 was one of the most amazing development environments ever made when you think about it - shame the language was so limited.

Still, I did prefer Borland Builder and do prefer Jetbrains Rider.

It's in the technical sense where Microsoft is different these days. But I don't believe the Company's Grasping Mindset (TM) has changed in the least.

I still do not trust Microsoft at all.

Patent wars, appropriation of standards, locking out of competitors, underhanded business tricks, etc, etc. None of that has changed. It still continues.

Ah. Yes it is. They still don't get it.

Yeah, but now Windows bugs, when you encounter them, are stupid as hell.

I am specifically talking about error code-less messages like "An error occurred"

My father is dead.

RIP.

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