Why 2020 is the best time to be a Microsoft developer!
The .NET ecosystem is thriving, and Microsoft is going in the right direction by focusing on developers (developers! developers!). But wait! This was not the case before. Microsoft has a long history of being hated by hippie programmers in California and the reason is obvious: Programmers Hate Proprietary Stuff!
“Microsoft has historically abused their market dominance to sell mediocre (and sometimes genuinely worse) clones of open-source software which was originally built by a hippie community of developers with a genuine passion to share their great code for free.”
The Mistake:
Basically, after Microsoft battled open source and Linux for ages “at the height of its desktop domination”, the company finally admitted that they were wrong. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft’s Former CEO) called Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches” back in 2001.
The Nadella Effect?
In recent years, Microsoft has been adopting open-source (PowerShell, Visual Studio Code, and even Microsoft Edge’s original JavaScript engine). In order to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10, Microsoft had to partner with Canonical. Moreover, it had to obtain Xamarin to aid mobile app development and GitHub to keep popular code repositories for programmers.
Microsoft president Brad Smith recently admitted: “The good news is that, if life is long enough, you can learn … that you need to change”.
Microsoft changed its attitude towards open source after naming Linux “a cancer”. The company is now considered to be one of the largest contributors to the open-source kingdom, competing with Facebook, Google, Apache, etc.
Michael Cusumano states that Satya Nadella was able to bring in a new culture, new enthusiasm, and made Microsoft an exciting place to work again. To cut a long story short, we can expect to see a lot more open-source efforts in Windows in the future.
The New Ecosystem:
New Microsoft Ecosystem is focused on programmers and enterprise customers. Microsoft has created a strong ecosystem with cloud infrastructure and services.
“With Microsoft enterprise products and cloud services being so tightly integrated, it provides strong incentives for business.”
And if you are a developer, look what Microsoft has got for you:
November 2020 is promised to change this big game. Microsoft announced a huge .NET 5 launch that will make .NET family different and will eventually create one unified platform. Microsoft’s team mentioned that .NET 5 will be used to target Windows, Linux, macOS, IOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS, WebAssembly, and even more.
Microsoft tends to produce a single .NET runtime environment and framework that can be used anywhere and has uniform runtime behaviors and software developer experiences.
The Future:
Microsoft states that,
“We see a bright future ahead in which you can use the same .NET APIs and languages to target a broad range of application types, operating systems, and chip architectures. It will be easy to make changes to your build configuration to build your applications differently, in Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, Azure DevOps, or at the command line”.
I certainly tend to agree with this statement.
Resources:
5 .NET Blogs for C# Developers to Follow in 2019 — DZone Web Dev, 2019
Microsoft: We Were Wrong About Open Source — The Verge, 2020
Bloomberg — Are You A Robot? — Bloomberg.com, 2019
Satya Nadella brought Microsoft back from the brink of irrelevance — Los Angeles Times, 2019
Understanding the Microsoft Ecosystem and Its Advantages — Arbela Technologies, 2019
