I believe a lot of companies are not directly paying for MSDN licenses, but retrieve them for free through a Microsoft partnership and by fulfilling conditions to obtain silver and gold competencies. I think this is the case for a lot of smaller companies.
Microsoft however is changing their partnership conditions by focusing more and more on Azure. To be able to stay a partner with similar benefits, you basically need to generate more and more revenue on Azure for Microsoft. Something that will not be doable for a lot of smaller companies in my opinion. And this also depends a lot on the focus of the company, whether it is a pure software development shop or also a reseller of Azure services.
Besides that, .net development is no longer necessarily windows development. My current team consists of 6 people. 1 uses Linux, 2 use OS X, 3 use Windows. We use Rider, Webstorm and Datagrip. We develop .net backends that run on a Linux app service plan. The front end is in Angular. The database is postgresql.
A lot of the .net developers in our company asked to use Rider instead of the VS they get through an MSDN license. Most of them are Windows users. Some people clearly think Rider is superior to VS, myself included…
As polyglot agency, we use Java for UNIX workloads, .NET is having its Python 2 / 3 moment with .NET Framework / Core, and plenty of stuff in large enterprises will probably never migrate. It is no accident that Microsoft is doing all the blog posts about how internal teams are migrating, or eventually started coming up with porting tools, which in the beggining they refused to provide (like in WCF's case). [0]
And even so, plenty of Microsoft products like Dynamics, SharePoint, VS, SQL Server CLR, are yet to make the transition to .NET Core.
So when doing UNIX workloads, we rather use languages what were created and grew up on that environment.
Visual Studio for .NET, Eclipse for Java, VSCode for node/devops (any of them for C++ workloads if needed as well), are basically how things go over here.
[0] - To be fair, Java is also having its Python 2 / 3 moment with anything beyond Java 8. Finally got to deploy Java 11 LTS into production (hurray!).
> plenty of stuff in large enterprises will probably never migrate
I think you are right. I worked, and still assist, on a couple of big projects that are built on .NET Framework. I recently pushed to have those upgraded to the latest .NET Framework version, latest version of their libraries, and have the csproj-files upgraded to the new style. Those projects are all WCF, they use NetTcp, they use transaction flow over WCF, some use WCF-msmq. There is a big dependency on distributed transactions over service boundaries, sql server and queues, and on WCF. It would be a major effort to rewrite those to run on .NET Core without distributed transactions and over HTTP APIs.
Those systems have been running just fine for over 10 years, are deployed on-prem and are only used internally on the company network. As long as .NET Framework is supported, there is no value in a rewrite to .NET Core for the business.
In the company where I work, we actually do C# on .NET Framework (maintenance, support) + Core (all new projects), Java, Delphi, and Angular + TypeScript for frontends. We use a lot of the JetBrains tools: IntelliJ IDEA for Java development, WebStorm for frontend development. We used to use Visual Studio + ReSharper for C# development and since Rider came out, a lot of people moved to that.
I believe a lot of companies are not directly paying for MSDN licenses, but retrieve them for free through a Microsoft partnership and by fulfilling conditions to obtain silver and gold competencies. I think this is the case for a lot of smaller companies.
Microsoft however is changing their partnership conditions by focusing more and more on Azure. To be able to stay a partner with similar benefits, you basically need to generate more and more revenue on Azure for Microsoft. Something that will not be doable for a lot of smaller companies in my opinion. And this also depends a lot on the focus of the company, whether it is a pure software development shop or also a reseller of Azure services.
Besides that, .net development is no longer necessarily windows development. My current team consists of 6 people. 1 uses Linux, 2 use OS X, 3 use Windows. We use Rider, Webstorm and Datagrip. We develop .net backends that run on a Linux app service plan. The front end is in Angular. The database is postgresql.
A lot of the .net developers in our company asked to use Rider instead of the VS they get through an MSDN license. Most of them are Windows users. Some people clearly think Rider is superior to VS, myself included…