Edit: The new Terminal and WSL(2) certainly make my days better. I would prefer Linux "on the metal" but it's getting less annoying that my company standardizes on Windows.
Everything plays into Azure though. .Net Core is great, but it’s just a little bit better with Azure. VSC is awesome, but it’s really awesome with WSL and Azure. And so on, and the best part is that they’ve adopted things like python as first class citizens for Azure system services so your developers can build things that run on the same services as the powershell scripts your operations guys build.
I don’t think Microsoft has changed one bit though. They are not doing it to be nice, they are doing it because it’s the best strategy to sell Azure and Officr365 along with it. I don’t mind, I work for a Danish city, Microsoft had by far been the tech company that interferes the best into our business and operations models for 25+ years. AWS is learning of course, but when you’re deeply invested in office365 anyway, there isn’t a long leap to Azure. Especially not when the tools that come with it are good.
Also, for a long time, all a .net dev needed was Visual Studio, so setting up a workstation for a developer was really, really simple.
Half the guys I know keep a bash file and all their vi configs on the cloud so they can move them over.
Honestly, when I did windows dev ~2008-2012 it was friggin -easy-. It literally "just worked". Way more so than osx obliterating it's compiler every update.