- Microsoft making software for Linux? Huh? Is this an experiment? How long are they going to support it?
- It doesn't look anything like Visual Studio. Was this a bunch of rogue Visual Studio programmers that ditched their Visual J#.NET stuff and decided to call a fancy text editor Visual Studio?
Earlier this year I read an article [1] that spelled out some of the history of how vscode came to pass. I was surprised by how good the electron-based editor was, and early on (2016) it immediately replaced sublime text for me, before later on replacing practically all other ides.
> - Microsoft making software for Linux? Huh? Is this an experiment? How long are they going to support it?
Microsoft goes where the money is. They want developers to target their platform(s), and native Windows applications are a dying breed, everything is moving to the web/cloud, which is where Azure - and let's not forget Github - comes to play.
A ton of the development targeting the web had moved to Mac, the same time they completely missed the mobile app train, which meant they effectively lost an entire generation of new developers, not familiar with MS or even wary of them.
Introducing better and free developer tools on every single platform under the Microsoft branding introduces many developers to them again, with a positive impression. Which suddenly opens doors for Azure. It's the same reason they now have WSL2 on Windows running a real, heavily customized kernel. They want developers to feel comfortable using Microsoft, so Azure has a better chance. A developer having a good experience with "Microsoft" VSCode and coding in it daily won't be shouting "M$ SUCKS! Azure sucks!" as quickly, and that's where it starts.
And you see a big push of MS in the enterprise world of moving clients to Azure, and they don't care what platform you're using. If you're big enough, they gladly send a bunch of engineers to introduce your developers and infra guys to Azure, and they don't care if you run Windows, Mac or Linux, all their tools surrounding this are all cross-platform. At a client of mine's R&D department, this happened while I was there, and they didn't care that 3/4 of the tech people there were using Macs. Their guy who came in to introduce k8s on Azure even had a Mac a big Linux penguin sticker over the Apple logo, surrounded with various stickers of cloud-targeted opensource software. When I asked him about that, he responded with something like "well, they don't care, although I probably shouldn't add RedHat sticker".
So as long as "the cloud", which Linux dominates, makes Microsoft money, they don't care. And given the situation we're in, I doubt they'll ever be in a dominant position there to allow them abusing their power like they did on the PC desktop market in the 90's and 2000's.
- Microsoft making software for Linux? Huh? Is this an experiment? How long are they going to support it?
- It doesn't look anything like Visual Studio. Was this a bunch of rogue Visual Studio programmers that ditched their Visual J#.NET stuff and decided to call a fancy text editor Visual Studio?