I'm going to add the customary "I love this new MS" line here. About 10 years ago a friend of mine offered to make an introduction with her cousin, who was an exec at MS, to see about a job when I got out of college. I said "no way, they're working on such boring and dull stuff there"
But after having worked in C# for a few years now (loving the language) and seeing all the open source moves they're making, it seems like a really exciting place to work these days.
And I'm sure there's a ton of renewed energy there.
I'm kind of a MS fanboy, but please don't believe their lies:
- VS is still not free; the community edition can only be legally used by very small companies with slim revenue
- the Xamarin acquisition will turn out to be a slap in the face of developers who want to cross target Android and WP
- the desaster of the Metro App API that has been replaced by UWP after being hailed as the future of application development for Windows (for a time, you could develop Windows 8.1 Metro Apps only on Windows 8.1 machine, not a Windows 8 machine)
Anybody doing any non-desktop application development on Windows is shouldering the full risk of obsolescence within 2 year.
I would really, really like a cooperation between Google and Microsoft in the area of the utterly braindead 90ies API of Android development by switching to XAML + C# ... ah, a man can dream!
That's a somewhat harsh accusation, where are they lying? Their web page clearly explains the usage scenarios and who can use it for "free" [0] (scroll down to "Usage").
Well, I don't know about that. They still try and lock you in to their tooling at every turn. I believe that the driving force behind this cool new Microsoft is Azure. They want you to run on their cloud and they'll follow you to OS X and Linux in order to get you there. Make no mistake, Microsoft is the best there is at finding out how to charge you.
Oracle has the added benefit of getting vastly different prices from different reps. At least MS client licensing was pretty standard across the board.
But after having worked in C# for a few years now (loving the language) and seeing all the open source moves they're making, it seems like a really exciting place to work these days.
And I'm sure there's a ton of renewed energy there.