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Comment by MartinCron | Hacker News Reader

I personally think that Microsoft should stick with things that only Microsoft can do, and leave the more cutting-edge innovations to others.

Example: the test automation tools into Visual Studio were terrible. Maybe they still are, I don't know, I've stopped using them. nUnit is just better. Their automated refactoring stuff may be OK, but the stuff from JetBrains is much, much better. Don't get me started on Team Frustration Server.

If they want to simplify and clean up their UI by starting with lower contrast icons to make the IDE background and the code foreground, that's totally a step in the right direction.

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> the test automation tools into Visual Studio were terrible

It went from "just plain bad" in VS2008 to "horribly awful" in VS2010. So awful that someone at MS named the process that manages the unit testing "QTAgent", so that when your machine slowed to a crawl and you opened the Task Manager to see what was wrong you'd see "QT" and conclude it was a background update issue with Apple QuickTime.

> I personally think that Microsoft should stick with things that only Microsoft can do

I'm very curious to see that list...

Microsoft (either explicitly or de-facto) owns the Common Language Runtime, the C# language, Entity Framework, ASP.NET, IIS, Windows OS, Windows Phone OS, XBOX, XBOX live, etc.

An example that I think of is LINQ (not linq-to-sql, mind you, but the language-integrated query stuff). So many things were required to make LINQ viable in the language and the tools, etc. that it doesn't seem realistic to expect an external dev team to throw something like that together. That stands in contrast to things like test automation, which nUnit had already been doing very well for years before Visual Studio tried to get into it.

I'm really not sure any of those is something only Microsoft could do, much less in the restricted scope of development tools.

When you say "that it doesn't seem realistic to expect an external dev team to throw something like that together", you are giving Microsoft's internal teams a power they simply don't have outside their very narrow zone of influence, as there is a lot of stuff being done outside it.

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