DotNet Core was a real surprise to me. As was Windows Subsystem for Linux.

With DotNet Core we have an extremely well crafted language available on all Windows and Linux. It's a great move on part of Microsoft.

I've heard it told that WSL was actually a repurposing of the Android emulation layer for winphone. If that's true it's a hell of an awesome pivot.

People may or may not remember, but most of this started with ALT.NET movement, with a number of influential people and developer supported or created a number of projects.

Before ASP.NET MVC, there was Castle Monorail. Before Entity framework or linq2sql, there was Nhibernate.

It was amazing times. It was clear Scott Guthrie started moving microsoft in that direction back in the day, after ALT.NET movement started proving success and showing an alternative to people.

I remember ALT.NET, and I would not retroactively declare a success. What it did was push into the open the fact that the Microsoft of the day could not effectively handle having rival technologies on their platform, open or closed source. Their strategy at the time was to try to provide a solution for every single product category, to the point of maintaining various no-cost but proprietary tools and libraries just to fill gaps (most of which are now abandoned).

> That to me is what DotNet Core

DotNet Core debugger is proprietary . You can only debug apps within Microsoft environment according to their license.

Same thing for most of the azure tools , you are only allowed to use them within Visual Studio.

I don't really called that "all in open source" .

It's gimmick to give C# devs the illusion of a choice.

Try to build , run & deploy a C# app on AWS with Atom. You're gonna have a bad time.

You've heard of Open Core, I imagine? That's what everyone does. Even the GitLab everyone's talking about in this context is Open Core.

And regarding your claim, you can do all of that, even with Vim if you want. You just have to build some scaffolding.

After all, they can't be expected to implementing everything for everyone. More than that, they were actually nice and created LSP (https://langserver.org/) and now they're thinking about a Debug Adapter Protocol (https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-debugadapter-node/issues...) that would do the same thing for debugging.

>You've heard of Open Core, I imagine?

It's not "Open Core" if the core is not open. In this case a debugger is core part of a language. It's a very clear movement in order to keep C# devs within their ecosystem and guarantee revenue with Azure. They loose money here , they must get it somewhere else.

This guarantee a total monopoly over the .NET ecosystem , Rider is probably one of the only tools that tried to offer an alternative they are stuck with the exact issue of not being able to bring the debugger because of that hostile license policy.

>Even the GitLab everyone's talking about in this context is Open Core.

I never talked about Gitlab and I don't care about them.

Don't be mistaken about MS , almost every move they do as a double intention behind it.

Just to name a few :

One MS engineer is core member to Webpack & Angular , why ? Windows Server dashboard is written in Angular , it's a critical product, they need some controller there.

One MS engineer is core contributor to Electron, why ? VS Code is powered by electron , it's a critical product, they need some control here as well.

One MS engineer is core contributor to Vue.js , why ? Azure is investing hundred of millions in China and Asia due to insane growth over the past 5 years, they need a good image in asia.

If you think MS has changed , you are delusional about the situation.

Influencing the things you care about in a way you like, seems like a sensible thing to do...

>DotNet Core debugger is proprietary . You can only debug apps within Microsoft environment according to their license.

People keep bringing this up as if it's some evil plan, not a legacy problem.

The debugger is based on Visual Studio's closed source debugger. Visual Studio is a major paid product. It's not simple to just extract an integral feature from a paid product.

No, it's not a technical challenge. It's a business issue. You know, the whole Visual Studio makes us a lot of money can we really afford to just open license its main feature?

I've always wondered - Do serious apps/products deploy directly from an IDE into AWS/Azure?