If you are serious about your career path as software engineer stay away from windows technologies.
Fair few good companies built on .net
Stackoverflow for one.
I agree they tend to be hidden behind the scenes companies. But those companies can be nice companies to work for(Sane work hours, good benefits, not expected to work overtime etc).
That's no longer completely true. While the core continues to run on Windows, SQL Server and .NET, pretty much everything around it is Linux-based and without that additions, the system would be unable to maintain its current performance.
Any platform would have problems without caching.
Unless you don't consider Blizzard a cool company. Not to mention Microsoft itself.
ps: I know of some that do, most don't, and they pay a LOT more than all the 'cool' companies.
That's fine if you are working for the money. Personally, I prefer the "cool" companies, even if they pay less. For some people, wearing a tie and spending 40 years working for a big bank or large insurance company and then retiring is an option and I respect them. It's not for everyone, however.
Google -> Adsense are their main profit and from where the real top dogs go, the rest work in projects that most of the time go to the crapper. A lot of their big name projects are based on C++. Facebook -> No idea, but they were using PHP and C++ right? (sorry, I don't follow much of FB engineering)
While I don't want to piss on Rails or Django or whatever, I've hardly seen a lot of companies that do use them to be working on really cool projects (and not another CRUD app for social horse riders to exchange organic cucumbers (hyperbole)). A lot of the 'cool' stuff that is happening in our world seems to be coming from more fringe languages (R, Julia, Haskell, Scala, F#) or old mainstream (C, C++, C#, Java) than the Ruby/NodeJS camp. If we go mobile, then we are even talking have to acknowledge both mainstream languages to develop are Java and a superset dialect of C - Objective C.
So honestly, if you take the beer and ping pong tables out of the equation, what are the advantages of these self-entitled cool companies over the others? (Btw, most big companies have pool tables, table tennis, gyms, beer, wine, XBoxes etc as much or more than the startups, they just don't post pictures of them on their blogs).
So no, I think VS for Mac / Linux is still a ways off. They're moving in that direction though - wouldn't be surprised if they bought Xamarin in order to make it happen.
You don't need to go further than the recent announcements and the excitement they generated among .NET users to see how dependent on Microsoft they are. It's Microsoft's show to run.