MS has always been solid with developer tools, documentation, and dev relations.
Even though I prefer administering Linux servers any day over Windows servers, I find myself often missing PowerShell when I use bash. It has some quirks but some of the design decisions are exactly what you'd hope someone would make if they redesigned a command-line shell 40 years later.
I still find it comical that we proudly paste around commands that just wrangle text no differently from what perl programmers did in the 90s, using sed, print, cut, etc, when things like PowerShell moved to piping objects between commands. It just removes a whole class of ambiguity.
> MS has always been solid with developer tools, documentation, and dev relations.
in my 25 years of using their tooling and reading their documentation, they've never been more than what just qualifies as borderline acceptable
I booted up VS2019 today for the first time in a while (after waiting 90 minutes for it to install) and it still feels like using a Jetbrains IDE from 15 years ago, and it's still worse than what Borland produced in the 90s
... and it's even slower than IntelliJ IDEA, which just seems amazing as IDEA is written in Java
I find Visual Studio intolerably slow, I don't quite understand why but it's been bad since at least Visual Studio 2017. Rider and IntelliJ are both much faster and I prefer them.
The documentation is excellent in my experience though. I love it. Visual Studio is really the only Microsoft developer tool I don't like. Even Visual Studio Code is much better.
Agree. going through .Net ans ASP.Net documentation and none of the classes/methods have usage examples except for the super obvious ones (like the "String" class). They just show method signatures and that's it.
It as if the tools were built "by IDE users", "for IDE users".
They may have stagnated but MSDN was, for many, many years, some of the best documentation I had seen anywhere. (Java was pretty solid too, and also PHP).
But maybe I didn't stray too far off the beaten path?
> MS has always been solid with developer tools, documentation, and dev relations
The single most heavily used Microsoft dev environment is the Microsoft VBA Editor. It has not had any update in nine years and is virtually unchanged in 22 years since the release of Office 2000, incredibly outdated in terms of usability. It also cannot be replaced by using a text editor like other IDEs can. It is anything but solid.
[0] "1987 - Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall's forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall's monitor isn't random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born."
Even though I prefer administering Linux servers any day over Windows servers, I find myself often missing PowerShell when I use bash. It has some quirks but some of the design decisions are exactly what you'd hope someone would make if they redesigned a command-line shell 40 years later.
I still find it comical that we proudly paste around commands that just wrangle text no differently from what perl programmers did in the 90s, using sed, print, cut, etc, when things like PowerShell moved to piping objects between commands. It just removes a whole class of ambiguity.