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I've been working with Microsoft tech for over 20 years and I absolutely love their style so much more than any other tech company. I'm really glad that they exist and I want to see them succeed. When I try to imagine a world without Microsoft and .NET, I honestly start feeling queasy.

My one big complaint about .NET is that they didn't open source it sooner. Maybe then, Silverlight or something really tight like that would have won out over the shit-fest of JavaScript that we've had to deal with for the past decade. JavaScript is finally catching up though and at least Visual Studio is one of the best editors you can use for that too. (Really, with the right extensions installed, I think it is the best.)

I have a lot of complaints about Microsoft too, but I always complain about things I love. Take my wife, for instance... :)

I have to ask, which extensions do you use for your JavaScript development?

Web Essentials, EditorConfig, Fix File Encoding and Line Endings Unifier. Also, Node.js tools and Tools for Apache Cordova if you work with those.

The reason I think it's the best - I haven't seen better HTML/JS/CSS auto-complete in another IDE. It's also got one of the best Android emulators for working with Cordova/Ionic. WebStorm comes close, but I don't like that I had to setup each new JS library to get auto-complete for it. VSCode comes close, but doesn't support code folding on // #region comments and it can't deal with large files as well as the full VS.

My first Microsoft product was MS-DOS 3.3.

Borland had better language tooling, but they lost their way, and Microsoft got Anders in the process as well, so in a way I consider that Turbo Pascal spirit lives in .NET, to a certain extent. :)

>I've been using .NET professionally and for hobby projects since version 1.1. While initially sceptical of this new MS platform, I was quickly sold on C# compared to Java

And I'm sure your early inclinations were then confirmed when they released 2.0 and their superb implementation of generics :)

I had been a longtime Perl hacker (it was a thing back then) and was still cutting my teeth on the cost/benefit tradeoffs of strongly-typed languages. I remember being quite frustrated in 1.x while attempting to write a data-access layer and having to use lots of casts to write reusable code.

It definitely took me longer than I'd like to admit to wrap my head around the usefulness of generics, but I certainly remember the "aha" moment I had when I realized how much cleaner they'd make my codebase.

In fact, I ended up completely dropping the code-generation tool I had written -- in Perl, of course :) -- to create the base classes which could work directly with our strongly-typed models.

> ASP.Net Webforms with AJAX being a particularly frustrating story

Very much agreed; I avoided using .NET for anything in any way web related until MVC came out. Working with those Microsoft black box server controls was just too much.

> like the .NET Core launch and migration-strategy not being all that convincing

I can forgive that, since it looks like their migration strategy with the upcoming .NET Standard 2.0 will be much more solid.

> I remember being quite frustrated in 1.x while attempting to write a data-access layer and having to use lots of casts to write reusable code.

Yeah, I hated the 1.x days, as well for the same reasons. I ended up using a template tool to generate strongly-typed collections to avoid all of the ugly casts every where.

Still, .Net 1.x was better than what I had available before, which was ASP & VBScript. Now that was a horrid environment.

Were you also using OCX for the ASP pages?

Nope, honestly dont recognize the OCX TLA. It was pretty much a CRUD app, written in webforms, with a few reports rendered as html/xls. It wouldnt pass as pretty by modern terms, but it was a beautifully cut gem circa 2003.

I used .NET for quite a few years, and was very happy with it. As much as people malign VB.NET, it provided the perfect path for me as an amateur-turned-professional developer - Access VBA -> VB.NET -> C#.

But over time I switched over to web development, and ASP.NET was just bad. The very nature of it - trying to replicate state with WebForms - was fine for intranets and internal tools, but an absolute disaster when working on a public web site. And it was a long time before ASP.NET MVC came along to try to tidy all of that up.

I remember discovering Nancy.fx (http://nancyfx.org), a perfect-looking, light-weight web framework. But I could never persuade anyone to use it - in my experience .NET shops lean heavily on using the accepted MS way of doing things unless you really, really don't have to. You could see that in the .NET community - open source, community-driven libraries just weren't a big thing. That frustration led me to trying out Node, and I never really looked back.

I miss working with C# a little, and sometimes wonder what the world would be like if MS had embraced open source earlier. Right now I'm writing TypeScript in Visual Studio Code - it isn't difficult to imagine that I could still be writing C# if MS had worked at creating a community around it, but alas, it never happened.

NancyFX is fantastic. I started using it a few years ago, after we switched off of IIS to the self-hosted OWIN web server stack for a couple of projects, and MVC was not (maybe still isn't?) supported there.

> There's a world of developers out there who appreciate what you do.

Couldn't agree more: https://dusted.codes/thank-you-microsoft-for-being-awesome

What initially soured me on .NET was how Microsoft branded everything with the .NET moniker.

I'm still a little bit skeptical about Microsoft's cross-platform future with .NET. They are saying and doing the right things, but I have a hard time trusting them.

> What initially soured me on .NET was how Microsoft branded everything with the .NET moniker.

Well, they kind of went all in at the time, even planned to base the next Windows version on .NET.

Which on my opinion, failed mostly due to the tension between WinDev (C++) and DevTools (.NET), than anything else.

Projects like Singularity and Midori prove that if the willingness was there to actually cooperate, they would have managed it.

Now we have .NET Native/UWP, which is basically the original idea of .NET when it was still called COM+ Runtime and AOT compiled.