Ask HN: What do you wish Microsoft was doing better re: web? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you wish Microsoft was doing better re: web?

4 pointscolinmegill5 comments

It's been too easy to criticize Microsoft on IE - but they're working on fixing that now (moving to continuous updates for Spartan) and seem to be engaging more with the community (Visual Studio Code seems more like Atom than Visual Studio). What other things do they need to work on / promote / think about / talk about / preach / practice / think through re: web & JS?

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The main thing I want from Microsoft is for .NET to be fully cross platform.

There have been some significant strides, but what I would love is for Microsoft to effectively come out and say "In x years time, .NET and Visual Studio will both run on Windows, Mac, and Linux".

Naturally, ports aren't really possible, but enough of Visual Studio could be ported with a Mac/Linux custom UI; just enough for there to be some kind of native-feeling experience across each platform.

I'm a .NET dev by day, and I absolutely love the ecosystem, but I dislike the idea that all C# developers work in enterprise, or on huge projects. So far, as a .NET dev, I've worked in one startup and two small agencies. I could probably spend the next decade working as a .NET dev in small companies without ever touching an enterprise code-base.

Building in Windows is fine, but you often feel like an imposter for working on a completely different OS to everyone else. Ultimately, if .NET was fully cross-platform I'd probably move to Linux, but I feel that if other OS's were embraced Windows would improve tremendously.

Get Microsoft Exchange to interoperate with other mail clients like Mozilla Thunderbird. The biggest challenge I find working on the Microsoft Development/Enterprise stack is vendor lock-in. Of course, that is where they make their money but it's also what I find most challenging. It's easier to start-off on an open stack and pivot into something else than with MS - so now I avoid MS and other enterprise solutions unless it is overwhelmingly necessary.

A big issue for me is the completely unnecessary size of most of the products they provide. Why are SQL Server, Visual Studio and Windows itself so big? It takes almost no time at all to provision a dev environment on Linux but hours on Windows for the same result. A concerted effort to slim down their tools and OS is needed IMHO.

Make Edge cross platform and open source it. Its annoying to have a browser that is locked to a specific OS yet may potentially be used by many in the future.

I am part of community and Visual Studio Code is definitely NOT what I want.

Gradually reducing investment in JS and TS and focusing on WebAssembly and related C# pipeline would be a great start.

Microsoft developers are mostly enterprise. JS is not what we like.

They are literally not listening to the voice of community: look at top UserVoice dev requests - no definite answer after years of silence http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...

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