[hack_fraud13]

This is an excellent writeup. Even though I come with a bias against MS, I did some work on the .NET framework and was just blown away with how great the dev experience is. Maybe I’m overselling it but I wouldn’t consider any other platform (except that it’s managed by MS). The old school win32 api is surprisingly powerful too.

Then looking at the spider web of new technologies they’ve released, half-released, and half-deprecated it makes me seriously doubt the future of MS. I mean they’ll always be a profitable, popular company just not whose tools I want to be locked into.

Working in the SharePoint ecosystem, for example, was totally miserable and I’ll never do it again if I can avoid it. Still love C# though.

[neonsunset]

Luckily .NET is not married to Windows and MS ecosystems at all for good 9 years already. I'd be long gone and using something else if it did :) (very happy I've stayed though)

Agree with your worries and hope they find their engineering excellence again, because while DevDiv teams working on .NET are isolated from problematic influence, it would be a shame for MS troubles to affect them. It's just too big of a project to continue without significant funding and there is probably not enough community goodwill and traction in absolute numbers (which are wasted on worse languages like Go) to carry the torch.