[StopHammoTime]

Home licensing has not been a big deal for a very long time. Their actual cash cows are things like Enterprise Licensing which aren’t going anywhere soon. You’ve also entirely excluded server licensing as well.

Have a read of their actual results and maybe re-think your hypothesis a bit. Microsoft’s revenue went up by 18%. I think they’ll be fine without some .NET extension,

[smcl]

Exactly. This is yet another bizarre move from MS which doesn't exactly seem to make financial sense and just pisses off developers who might otherwise be persuaded to soften their stance towards them. I wonder if these are part of a deliberate strategy MS are trying, or just the actions a few overly ambitious managers

[nerdix]

This seems like one of those decisions that they will walk back within a month similar to the "hot reloading" fiasco. This makes even less sense than that because it was clear which moat they were protecting (Visual Studio proper) by making hot reloading "exclusive" to Visual Studio 2022.

But this extension, by its very nature, is for the VS Code. So, in this case, VS Code isn't being neutered to make a paid product more appealing. The only thing I can think of is that they want to keep the "secret sauce" away from JetBrains to give Visual Studio an advantage over Rider. Its really perplexing when you consider that they created LSP and DAP. And C# was one of the first languages to have an implementation for both standards which opened up the door to potential C# feature parity between Visual Studio and non-Visual Studio editors.

I just don't understand why anyone working on .NET tooling would think that this decision would go over better than the hot reloading one. Once you open the FOSS genie, you cannot put it back in the bottle without stirring controversy. Is protecting some small percentage of VS license revenue worth all of this bad PR they seem to be willing to subject themselves too?