While I myself wold newer use windows for anything unless there was no other way, I hope that the stuff that Microsoft is doing might influence some windows people to start doing stuff the "right" way.
The phrase "the right way" always makes me chuckle a bit. We all seem to know what it is, yet we seldom agree on it. My first 10 years of programming was spent working on a system built on Windows. First ASP/COM and then later ASP.net -- and that thing practically printed money. Did we build it "the right way"? No, certainly not. But our stock options didn't seem to notice, and at the end of the day, that is what matters to me.
> The phrase "the right way" always makes me chuckle a bit
Here, outside Windowsland, we have been using package management for more than a decade and, after that long, I'd suppose we have it pretty much nailed down. There are still some different ideas and approaches (different dependency management schemes, pre-compiled vs. locally compiled, ports), but I'd guess we get it right most of the time. The "right way" is a tricky concept, but, seriously, this is all very mature by now.
Well put. It always amazes me how much further unix/linux is from Windows. Once you get your head out of the "all Microsoft for everything" you really start to see the real advances that are being made everywhere. And then you realize in some ways, Microsoft is always playing catch-up. For desktop apps building for Microsoft is a given, considering the OS monopoly in business and home but for most other things its a question mark.
Much of this stuff is coming from the Azure people working with the Puppet and Chef people to get the tools needed into windows via powershell I guess.