[JMTQp8lwXL]

The million dollar question: Will Microsoft's developer tools draw in more business? (In my mind, the play is, if Microsoft is more friendly to developers, and developers sometimes hold the keys to what vendors to work with, new business could come in).

For example: I use VSCode, but I'm not sure I'd pay for Azure. In prior threads on HN, I recall reading some displeasure without service outages and availability issues.

Unless Microsoft had some other motive for caring about developer tools after a long period of not doing so. Regardless, their contributions to the open source community are welcome.

[Keyframe]

What do you mean by not caring about dev tools for a long period? Their tools were always industry-leading. It's what brought platform dominance to them in the first place. One might even hear a faint chant from the past: developers, developers, developers!

[JMTQp8lwXL]

Did you ever try developing a web application and using IE's Developer Tools to inspect? Chrome gave them a run of their money.

[Keyframe]

Web applications are only development there is? Also, Chrome is on Windows too.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

No, but it's an example of where, in the past, Microsoft didn't take the lead on developer tooling.

[rudedogg]

Visual Basic vs. Delphi for RAD/GUI programming comes to mind as well.

[snowAbstraction]

Maybe in some categories but when I think of Visual Studio for C++, MS didn't really try until a few years ago.

[k0dede]

Vs has been the best c++ ide for a while. the debug is way better

[stochastic_monk]

snowAbstraction may be thinking about VS’s infamously poor relationship with the C++ standard.

[snowAbstraction]

* I think before 2015 some things were working better or faster in other IDEs.

* I am happy with with the big improvements in VS starting around 2015. But the fact, that the C++ support was so bad in earlier versions (even if it was better in some ways than other IDEs) that it makes me upset that people had to put up with inferior older versions for over decade.

* It was not my original point but yes MS does not follow the standard very well, at least before. I even found a compiler bug myself back in VS2015 (the last version I used before moving linux server dev.)