I'm generally weary of MS having too much influence over open source with Github and VSCode, particularly due to their history.
My creep alarm went off a bit when I recently started a project to test the waters with TypeScript. I was asking on a forum how to deal with native JS dependencies without types, and he answer I got was "Are you using VSCode? It will just find the community maintained type packages for you".
It seems to me that VSCode's "just click the button to solve my problem" style of UX makes it very easy for developers to become reliant on proprietary workflows without even realizing it. If one were to pursue an EEE strategy, this would not be a bad way to start.
> It seems to me that VSCode's "just click the button to solve my problem" style of UX makes it very easy for developers to become reliant on proprietary workflows without even realizing it.
Certainly “making a better product that’s easier to use” isn’t something we should be discouraging.
They are not forcing you to use their solution. You can go your always go your own way.
I am primarily a vim user with VS Code as my secondary editor. I have never ever used their one-click solutions.
I have seen someone choosing "Yes" to everything VS Code said after installation, and in no time their machine was filled with bloat that they would never ever need.
But I see this as a good thing. It is making programming set up easier for the uninitiated, which is good.
See I disagree that it's a good thing. I think accessibility is a good thing, but I would rather see it in the form of better development stacks from the ground up.
Just building more tooling to cover up pain points by wrapping them in more and more layers of bloat is just making a mess. You wind up needing a super complex system to do simple things, which nobody really understands, and which uses a ton of unnecessary resources. If you extend that strategy ad infinitum, you need Moore's Law to persist just to keep performance stable while running more and more layers of VSCode plugins.
I also don't necessarily think some barriers to entry are always a bad thing. Things like notebooks are great for giving people access to a simple programming environment which is easy to set up. But if someone is going to be committing code to a serious project I'm working on, I don't mind if they have to know enough about computers to at least run a few commands in the terminal.
It seems to be me you are arguing against the very nature of complex systems, and the way we have built the entire computing stack for the last 80 years.
Lower level technologies need to be more flexible to allow usage in many different cases. On top of that we build different abstractions that are suitable for only a restricted number of uses cases, but that make them much simpler to think about and work with. By thinking at this higher level we are able to build much more complex logics than we would have before.
I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck in a world where we still have to do everything in assembly because we were too afraid to embrace the compiler.
I'm not against abstraction in principal, but in my opinion it should be intentional and measured.
Progress isn't only about building and endlessly taller stack of abstractions such that we eventually can't see the computer underneath. Sometimes it's about looking at the stack we have, and building a smaller and smarter one based on the lessons we learned along the way.
I disagree that making setup easier for the uninitiated is good.
The uninitiated should begin with a bare-bones text editor and a shell prompt. If you don't understand what is happening from that level, you will never understand what is going on in complicated frameworks. You will be the programming equivalent of your grandmother who thinks Facebook is the internet.
Although I sympathize with this line of thought, remember that we’re all uninitiated by the standards of a few decades ago. The time was when you were uninitiated if you couldn’t hand assemble your programs to a series of hex digits. Indeed, I own a copy of a book aimed at children that teaches you how to do just that for the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum. (The publisher released it as a free PDF if anyone is curious: https://yurichev.com/mirrors/machine-code-for-beginners.pdf)
I agree with what you are saying, and probably it is part of the nature of progress to continually move some of the core topics out of the realm of CS common knowledge to make way for the new. However I think not all things are created equal.
For instance, I think basically everyone can agree that moving from assembly to C and other high-level languages was basically a strict upgrade, and obviated the need for assembly programming in all but a few specific use cases.
By contrast, using the command line and shell programming is every bit as relevant as it was 20 years ago, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
Both assembly and the shell are difficult and alienating to newcomers. But learning is mostly academic at this point, while learning the other opens up entire new worlds in terms of what you can do with a computer.
In other words, learning assembly is like learning latin. Maybe interesting, but not particularly useful. Learning bash is like learning Chinese. Not particularly easy, but there's a lot you can do with it right now.
that PDF is awesome and i have never seen it before. i had to teach someone about programming from absolute zero and i followed a very similar approach. starting with what a transistor is, a basic intro into a cpu, what machine code is, low level languages and high level languages which took us into a python hello world. you could see the wheels turning at the end of the session...
That sounds amazing. It makes me want to learn more about transistors, and how CPUs actually work at an EE level. My studies started with registers and machine code as the "ground truth" - but it would be cool to have an intuition about what is actually physically happening inside the CPU and memory.
There's a lot of truth in this. Getting the uninitiated to the point of solving problems is not a bad thing, per se, but too much of that creates cargo cult programmers, and that is a very bad thing. And very common.
If your goal to solve a problem, then you should use something that helps you solve that problem quickly. If your goal to learn how to solve problems, then you probably shouldn't. Those are both valid use cases, but they are very different.
This is a false equivalency, you can always go back and learn how the lower layer works. Tons of people learn how to drive, and many of them go on to learn how their car works.
Get people excited and empowered, then teach them some arcana.
Okay, but, does that enable you to solve the problems you want to solve using computers? We have to remember that that is the end goal -- spend less time programming computers, and less time solving problems, and more time with a working solution.
I would not be as hard-line as the other commenter in terms of suggesting that everyone should start with bash and vim, however I think it is a valid point that learning the principals of computing is valuable, and tools which abstract that away are not always doing you a favor.
> We have to remember that that is the end goal -- spend less time programming computers, and less time solving problems, and more time with a working solution.
I of disagree that time-to-solution is the true end-goal. It might be, depending on your use case, but there may be other constraints. For instance, let's say I make a piece of software, and I have a choice between choosing an "easy" solution which takes me 100 hours to complete, or a hard version which takes 500 hours. And let's say the easy version allows the user to complete their task in 30 seconds, where the hard version allows them to complete their task in 10 second. That means every time my code is executed, I have saved 20 seconds of the user's time by doing things the hard way.
Now let's say my code is executed on average 1000 times per hour. That means every hour my product is out there, I save about 5.5 hours of user time for doing things the hard way. In only 72 hours, that 400 hours of productivity I "lost" is made up for, and for the rest of the lifetime of the product it's pure upside.
At the end of the day, programming is about making computer hardware do what you want. If we let ourselves get too far away from the computer, it's hard for us to do that well.
And the best way to spend as little time as possible solving problems is solving them the right way. Which you can achieve best with some understanding of what's actually going on in the background.
If you know the basics you can apply them to any tool. If you only learn to build software using a specific framework, IDE etc. you're probably going to have problems if anything in the setup changes. One day in a simple text editor and a shell taught me more about how Java builds work than years of formal education, because all those years were spent in an IDE and nobody even explained what the classpath is.
Not at the margin, no. If you can solve a problem by clicking a button, why the hell would you spend more time doing it any other way? Some sort of principle? Seems poorly justified.
If they know how that btn click solves the problem, then that's fine. But if they are an engineer and they don't know what the btn does, then they aren't really an engineer in that sense. While that btn click may help them solve that problem, knowing how that works is important to motivate solutions for other problems that are analogous to it which is the job of an engineer.
If they're an enduser, btn click is exactly what they should use. If they are an engineer, and clicking btns is all they know, then they are going to be a very limited engineer. This too is fine and there is a place for that. But, if such an engineer starts to think that they are a great engineer because they solve all the problems quickly whenever there are btns, they are going to be a liability for teams when there aren't any btns to click. Because they are going to be too arrogant to listen to those who might know how to solve them which aren't necessarily btn clicks (because to them all solutions must be btn clicks). You see, it's more than a matter of principle. It's about the calibre of the engineer you want to produce.
This is a whole chain of assumptions not rooted in anything I said. I'm not saying you don't need to learn anything. I'm saying there's no sense in making trivial tasks harder than they need to be. Of course you need to understand how to fix problems when there isn't a button to click. That doesn't mean more buttons to fix things is bad.
It should still be possible to solve the problem manually, though. Inevitably someone will run into some special case where clicking the button doesn't work and more control is needed.
Arguments that more powerful tools should exist are not arguments that having a button for things is bad. It would be better if more things were just buttons.
If that also puts a single entity in charge of determining what features go into, and/or what fixes remain out of, that "better product", then there is a very real control issue.
Look at the case of the Web, HTML+CSS+JS standards and specifications (Drew DeVault triggered DDoS measures simply trying to access documentation), and the inability of even G-MAFIA scale companies from being able to sustain their own independent browser engine cores (Microsoft and MSIE).
Control is the ability to determine the options of others. A single entity providing an overwhelmingly appealing programmatic interface is a locus of control.
> makes it very easy for developers to become reliant on proprietary workflows without even realizing it.
Most young developers don't care due to inexperience and coolness factor. As code becomes more sophisticated, build reproducibility starts to become a problem.
And, Microsoft is trying to own the toolchain's strategic points this time, making reproducing a build almost impossible without their tools.
Yes exactly. And a lot of this stuff is open-in-name-only. Like I tried to implement an LSP for a language I am working on using Sublime and nvim as test benches, and the documentation is so bad and some of the interfaces are so convoluted that it seems like it's basically impossible to do without starting with their VSCode starter project or reverse-engineering an exiting LSP.
And with the push towards remote development, I can see things moving toward a world where the default is not even running things locally. Lines get blurred, and sooner or later you're depending on proprietary Azure services without even realizing it.
On the other hand, Eclipse is still steadily improving. They're already very good in remote development. Lately they've implemented "build into docker". Concerning containers are a more open technology (many runtimes, open standards, etc.), there are still very good real IDEs with very rich features.
How is eclipse doing in terms of performance these days? I used it maybe 10 years ago for some C++ and Java development, and it was quite capable, but it had the feeling of being a lurching behemoth.
That's been a huge & awesome improvement in VS Code & Visual Studio with package managers. I think there are plenty of items to be worried about but I don't think this is one. It's a nice feature.
I say this as someone who had to search through a crazy large GitHub repository of community Types back in the day all the time. Then you end up having to send some PRs & wait for them to get approved if you hope to use the types in a larger team or as part of a build process. You could also create your own fork until they're approved & then go back & update the package.json.
Pretty much all community types come from a single repository with a consistent naming scheme. For example, if you use “lodash”, types are available via “@types/lodash” from DefinitelyTyped (the DT repo is now maintained by the typescript team). This is even tracked on npm. VS code can just see if “@types/$package” exists and then prompt you to add it
VSCode is open source, so relying on it isn’t relying on something proprietary. (The standard builds do contain some closed source telemetry stuff IIRC.)
When you open a Python project, the recommended Python extension is Microsoft's proprietary Python extension with Pylance which refuses to run on VSCodium or Linux distribution builds of vscode-oss. I refused to install it, so I didn't test whether you can enable the older open source LSP instead. And I couldn't find any other Python extensions sadly.
Yeah I think this is just one example of how VSCode can serve to blur the lines of what are OSS dependencies, and what are proprietary ones. It takes a certain amount of vigilance to have a truly open source development workflow on VSCode.
I think Microsofts' long-term plan is to get most developers to use cloud-based coding environments, which is not unlikely given that software stacks become more complex to the point where setting up a local development environment is really hard. Once they achieve that they're in a very good position to sell their own cloud services by making the integration into the development workflow really smooth.
So their acquisition of Github and the large effort invested in VSCode as well as privileging their own software stack over competing solutions makes perfect sense, business wise. It probably won't be good for free software though.
It's not just services. The most important parts of VSCode are not free software. WSL is designed to make free software users and developers comfortable on a proprietary OS.
Microsoft is also one of the biggest gaming companies in the world (via the xbox platform) and zero initiative on free software anything over there.
Microsoft doesn't care at all about free software, or software freedoms. It's just a means to an end.
This is the conclusion that most people don't ever reach. They assume that there is an altruistic element to things like open source within Microsoft (and other commercial organisations) and perhaps among the developers there is... giving back, helping out and all that.
But if Microsoft (or Google, FB, etc. etc) thought for one second that supporting, nurturing and building open source software and tools was affecting the bottom line negatively they'd drop it in a heartbeat: they answer to the shareholders and they only have one question - will this make more money?
Even if we take this as true, and they only care about making WSL and related projects as a means to the end of acquiring more users/dollars… where is the bad news?
The average ice cream shop exists to sell me ice cream, they’re not on an ideological quest to improve the craft. And I can eat their ice cream just fine, because I like ice cream.
Ask yourself this: would a public-facing ice cream shop run by Google, Microsoft or Facebook be content with just simply selling you ice cream?
Microsoft sells Windows, but they are not content with just simply selling you an OS. There's plenty of privacy violating data collection and ads in the OS.
This isn’t really a counterpoint to what I’m saying.
Windows 10 has tons of stuff that I don’t like. But the advancements in WSL and open source are a good thing.
By all means, apply pressure to Microsoft for things that they do wrong, and for bad decisions they make. But when they’re doing a good thing, maybe the default stance shouldn’t be to speculate about ill intent. Sometimes it’s nice to just enjoy the good thing.
> The most important parts of VSCode are not free software.
What do you mean by this?
The core IDE is all open source (except some closed source telemetry).
The common example I see quoted is that the super-old, legacy, C# debugger is closed source, but as far as I know there is nothing stopping people writing an alternative debugger for C# in VS Code. Jetbrains did it for Rider.
>> The most important parts of VSCode are not free software.
> What do you mean by this?
The SSH remote connection stuff, the Pylance Python LSP (you are not allowed to use it - the binary - in any other editor but VS Code, not even the OSS Codium) and some other extensions are CSS.
"""Can I load Pylance in Code – OSS?
Pylance is licensed for use in Microsoft products and services only, so can only be used on official Microsoft builds of Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces."""
While I agree that that shows MS doesn't really love open source as much as they say they do, I don't think you can really call those "The most important parts of VSCode".
Well there is Pyright by MS (that's what Pylance is based on) and python-language-server by MS - that one has been superseded by Pyright and is deprecated in Code.
Not sure what OP is referring to, but Microsoft has multiple Visual Studio Code extensions (e.g. Remote SSH) that are closed-source and hard-coded not to work with any self-compiled versions of Visual Studio Code.
While I'm also a big fan of nix and friends, one big issue with this is that setting up databases, or in general services, with nix-shell is impossible.
I'd argue Microsoft's target demographic isn't companies with a cloud native focus, its companies who are desperate to get in the cloud but encumbered by old guard ideas like enterprise software, and terrified to give the insider threats they grudgingly call employees their own Linux box that isn't wsl kneecapped by GPO.
A cloud-based coding environment doesn't really make it easier to debug your code in the cloud environment it would be executed.
A development environment and a production environment are inherently different in vast ways.
So even if your development environment is in the cloud, you still need a way to package your code and transfer to the environment similar to where it will run in production (whether it's bare metal, virtualized, container, or managed (e.g. serverless))
What the cloud providers are working on is making it easier and faster to continuously package transfer your development state to your prod environment.
But whether you're coding in a browser or locally it doesn't accelerate the deployment path.
I feel like this is exactly where Microsoft ist aiming for with VSCode, Codespaces etc:
1. Give away the Code Editor as Open source, but make important Plugins (Python Development, Live Share,...) closed source.
2. Make the life for developers easier/ more productive by integrating cloud offerings. Oh, you're starting a python project? Use our code space for development and click here to automatically deploy it to Azure, everything correctly configured. No need to deal with Ops.
3. Make $$$ with Cloud services and enterprise tooling.
I started off with Windows development. Later on I developed using Windows terminal and WSL. I've also done development on Mac. Then one fine day I tried Linux. It blew my mind. What is coming to Windows now is a pale imitation of what Linux has been having for decades. Amazing terminals, terminal multiplexers, tiling window managers, keyboard driven tools, package managers...
Ok, this comment had me actually laughing out loud.
That said, the situation with W10+WSL reminds me a bit of the early days around OS X when we suddenly had a consumer grade desktop Unix experience. W10+WSL is clunkier, but trending in a decent direction.
With Windows 11 turning people off because it's forcing TPM-only hardware for both developers and users in general, I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 11 marks the final exodus for developers leaving for Mac and Linux.
For people like myself, that care mostly about UNIX/POSIX than Linux in particular, had Microsoft been serious about the NT POSIX subsystem, most likely Linux wouldn't have taken off as it did.
I still think macOS is the most user friendly UNIX, though.
As for WSL, I really don't care about it, I have been using VMWare with Linux distributions for about 10 years now.
I’ll disagree with you- Linux very much took off because it’s license is cost free and there was/is an influential FLOSS software philosophical movement.
It might be easier than ever, but it is far easier on Linux. It shows that people developing terminal(s) on Windows are probably not Linux users - it is little things like secondary clipboard and terminals hanging that make one want to scream.
I’m curious about the cloud-based coding you’ve mentioned. What I’ve seen so far is interesting, but not terribly compelling to use day to day. It has a place, certainly, such as education or possibly interviewing.
What about the author’s point that VSCode competes too well with visual studio, and that MS has intentionally underfunded Omnisharp, and that their own software stack continues to be poorly supported on VSCode?
The large effort in VSCode seems poorly invested if it’s used to push people to a paid product like VSCode.
Microsoft promising `dotnet watch` for a while and then dropping that certainly doesn't help with the already pretty damaged view of Microsoft not caring about open source developers. Here is the gist of the situation from Microsoft's point of view:
> Throughout the last year we’ve been working to enable the best possible Hot Reload experience in Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 6. Part of our goal was to also explore making this feature available to customers through a variety of mechanisms such as bringing the full power of Hot Reload to as many .NET and C++ developers as possible when running through Visual Studio 2022 debugger, supporting Hot Reload when running .NET 6 apps without the debugger, and the very basic Hot Reload support we added to the .NET SDK tools through dotnet watch.
> As we reflect on what was accomplished, and what is still in front of us, the backlog continues to grow. This includes many high value scenarios that will benefit the broadest number of developers, including focus areas such as .NET MAUI, Blazor, adding support more types of edits, more optimized experience when working with XAML apps, and much more.
> With these considerations, we’ve decided that starting with the upcoming .NET 6 GA release, we will enable Hot Reload functionality only through Visual Studio 2022 so we can focus on providing the best experiences to the most users. We’ll also continue to pursue adding Hot Reload to Visual Studio for Mac in a future release.
So, first they wanted "bringing the full power of Hot Reload to as many .NET and C++ developers as possible" but now they shifted to "focus on providing the best experiences to the most users".
Best part of this whole thing is the pull request which was opened (https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/pull/22217) but " locked and limited conversation to collaborators" straight after opening it as Microsoft anticipated the backlash but still went ahead with the change.
Seems they still have a lot to learn before they can indeed be trusted.
Ugh. I've been using dotnet core on Linux since it was introduced. While it mostly works fine, I always had the feeling that Linux (and mac probably also) is a second class citizen. They care about Linux compatibility inasmuch as it allows you to build the application on a Linux-powered CI server and deploy to another Linux server. Developing outside of Windows? most of their tools are not available or have a greatly diminished feature set (for example, you can take a memory dump of a running dotnet application, but can't really inspect it without a Windows VM).
If not for JetBrains Rider, dotnet development on Linux would be close to impossible IMHO.
When looking for my next gig I'll probably be switching to something else.
Personally, I prefer Rider to VS on all platforms, including Windows. It has much better performance, feels like a modern IDE, and after doing Java for a few years in between .NET gigs using IntelliJ I've gotten to prefer how IntelliJ-platform IDEs work anyway. The "Structure" pane is super useful.
Whereas, Visual Studio... well, let me just say first that I know real people work on that product, some of them are probably reading this, and if so, I appreciate you.
Unfortunately, every time I've ended up having to switch from Rider to Visual Studio for some edge case scenario or to do an Azure deployment (before we moved that process into CI), I'd end up frustrated. Even with VS 2022, which is better, it's slow compared to Rider. Also, despite a couple of cosmetic coats of paint and new icons and such for VS'22, it doesn't really feel like a modern IDE or like it's changed noticeably since 2010 or so. Granted, stability is often a plus, but there's a ton of workloads in there that I don't think are relevant to a modern cross platform .NET Core 3.x/.NET 5/6 development experience and I suspect supporting all of that is a factor in why it's so slow.
I haven't even gotten into how much worse the performance in VS gets when you add ReSharper to the mix, and even with all the genuine refactoring improvements in VS in the past decade, I still feel like I'm working with a couple of broken fingers when I don't have ReSharper active. Better refactorings, better intellisense.
I haven't had much experience with .NET on Visual Studio, but I would say that Jetbrains Rider is probably the best thing you can get for .NET work on Linux.
As a matter of fact, they implemented their own hot-reload functionality themselves [0][1].
I actually preferred Rider even before fully moving my .NET work to Linux. If you have any experience with IDEA, you'll feel right at home (they are very similar and can be operated with pretty much the exact same shortcuts).
I didn't read that as, "Our focus is changing from A to B," so much as, "We originally hoped to ship A + B, but A ended up being more work than we expected. B is achievable and impacts more developers, so we're focusing on that first".
> The big issue here is that Microsoft has an internal struggle going on at the moment. On one hand they want to be seen as a new version of Microsoft who loves Open Source, but on the other hand they want to actively block advances in OSS projects like the .NET SDK which could undermine their own commercial offerings.
For years, the narrative has been that MS doesn't want to give away their tools for free because they don't want to undermine the commerical offerings of their ecosystem. There used to be a ton of companies making development tools, components, and so on. Microsoft mostly made money with Windows, Office, and so on, so they could give away their own tools almost for free (but preferred not to in order to keep the vibrant ecosystem running). It is really odd that anybody at MS cares about whether VS or VS code or an external tool is more popular.
Also this whole infighting between departments seems to be contaproductive. If I were top level management, I would tell people to get their shit together. If instead of working together to make the best products possible, a manager tells off an employee for working on the C# extenstion for VS (because it hurts his personal goals) I would at the very least reprimand the manager. That VS code has poor .NET support, or for another example that MS graphical toolkits have so much churn and they don't use them themselves, are really embarrasing mistakes. I'm sure people have been fired for lesser problems...
In 2000, I worked at a web company that was a “Platinum Partner” with MS, and we did a lot of consulting work with them for various large clients. Me and another guy were invited to come out to learn about this new platform that MS was building called “Cool”, which was the internal name for c# at the time, and the early forms of .NET.
While we were there, Scott Guthrie (I’m 99% sure it was him) was supposed to lead us in some discussion but wasn’t there, and someone filled in for him. We learned later it was because he had been called into Bill G’s office and got dressed down a bit because Scott had basically created his own version of Apache web server to use within the dot net tools. It was rudimentary and temporary, but the reason he did it was because he had been trying for months to get the IIS team to give him a version of their server for use within the dot net dev tools, and they just kept putting him off. So he went around them and built his own. They found out, went up the chain, and Scott got dragged into the office to be told to cut it out and work with them instead.
Granted, this is 20 years ago, so my memory might not be as crisp, but it stuck with me as a lesson that Microsoft was not a single company, but like 10-15 different little companies, and they competed among themselves as much as they worked together. And as OSS was coming up at the time I thought, “they have no chance to survive what’s coming.”
In a .NET Rocks episode there is a guest that recalls his team using him as means to get information, because he was an external contractor, and it was easier for him to get the required information from another team, than having both teams talking directly.
> Microsoft was not a single company, but like 10-15 different little companies, and they competed among themselves as much as they worked together.
This is true for probably most – if not all – companies above a certain size. In my experience it really takes off at about 100 people, and it gets worse from there. My armchair psychology take is at that level you no longer know everyone in the company personally and "cliques" begin to form.
It has always like that, that is why we lost Managed DirectX, XNA, .NET Native, C++/CX, the Longhorn failure, MAUI vs Forms vs WPF vs WinUI vs UWP vs Blazor.
I am not affected by this as licensed VS user, but I also don't like how this story has been playing, and join my voice to those complaining how this was handled.
We can't trust MS with anything, and the same can be said about every tech giant.
Therefore it really is a problem that MS has managed to get hold of github and npm. In my opinion it would be beneficial if this kind of "important infrastructure" belonged to a non-profit organization.
It is the runaway nature of our late-stage capitalistic "utopia" that large companies just absorb anything that touches their edges, continually growing larger, and absorbing ever more. Skype, LinkedIn, GitHub, StackOverflow, and Slack were all nicely-running, profitable businesses, with agendas that made them attractive to end users. But their owners all had a price, and now they're all part of monstrous companies with agendas that do not necessarily line up with mine. On the one hand, this is perfectly understandable. On the other, I think the government needs to stop these sorts of mergers and acquisitions to create vertical (as well as horizontal) monopolies. We're living in an age of modern-day "robber barons," and we need the government to return to policies from those days, including STEEPLY progressive taxes, and vigilant anti-trust action. Unfortunately, the Citizens United ruling will make this an impossibility until it is "repealed" with new law.
There are a lot of things that China does that other countries don't do, some of these things are bad, and personally I wouldn't want them to be implemented where I live (social credit score, censorship etc.). I don't see how engaging in a race to the bottom with China here is a particularly useful line of thought.
The CCP has recently been favoring anti-trust policy. Having enormous all-encompassing companies that absorb everything is not necessarily a great economic strategy.
"I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." - Charles Babbage
The only people benefitting from these mega-mergers are the handful of VC's and the C-levels involved. Everyone else suffers harm, including the government, which has reduced influence on actual governance. Money talks, even in Communism, and huge mega-corporations also impact China's government's ability to govern. I expect them to limit these sorts of arrangements more strictly than the US.
Lots of "commercial open source" products use limited features in the open source tool to sell the "pro version". Maybe what we're seeing is not MS being awful, but executing a pretty normal open/premium type strategy (hi there ElasticCo).
As a developer I'd love to be able to use .NET like I do Python, Go, JavaScript and Nim (ok, and Java, too). I love being able to write software that can run anywhere, using the editors and tooling that I like. VS Code is amazing in that it fits into my world. VS on the other hand, forces me to run a specific OS, and use a prescribed tool chain. FWIW, sometimes the prescribed way might be better, but it's not the way I want to do it.
Sure. There is just one thing though: we tend to treat companies like people. So e.g. if they say something today, we expect it to be valid also tomorrow. We also tend to expect them to behave in a way humans do, that is, if they present a certain vision, we somehow expect they would follow. And if they follow certain steps, we assume they walk the talk and give them credit for that.
But the reality is much more complex. You have competing teams of individuals each with their own interests. You have managers who come and go. You have sudden decisions that change everything during one afternoon. As an employee, you believe in something only to discover a few months later you were in fact mistaken.
I'm not cynical, but the best strategy is to be realistic. We all know Microsoft will do everything in their own interest and they are not basically different from any other company. That's a fact. Whatever they say about their love for Linux or Open Source is correct as long as it benefits them, not an inch more. Whoever goes in their way will be mercilessly crushed, as happened in numerous companies in the past like Lotus, Novell, Borland and so many others. Don't build your business based on their products, and if you do, have a backup-up plan and an exit strategy ready.
I am an advocate of such kind of features, however the way this situation was handled is quite messy, the feature was already there and available on dotnet watch, when they decided to kill it.
I own a VS license, so it doesn't affect me, but it leaves a sour taste.
> Maybe what we're seeing is not MS being awful, but executing a pretty normal open/premium type strategy
There is a difference of degree, if not kind.
It's one thing for a smaller vendor to offer an 80% solution for free, and 20% enterprise features where there is competition to protect the market and the users.
It's quite another for a monopoly-level player that, for example, owns GitHub, to flex and threaten the market.
I'd support some serious anti-trust looks at what's going on across all of BigTech. MisterSofty is not alone in needing a review.
The software is still open source. If you want the premium feature for Hot Reload, then it’s like $13 a month for a license for Linux/Mac/Windows. Everything else is fully supported for free.
Again, what pisses people off is not that some features are premium but rather when features are promised to be free/open source, was working in the open source version but then pulled back to be a premium feature when Microsoft changed their mind.
While that’s true, since we are talking about trust… I can trust Microsoft’s intentions more than I can Googles or Facebooks.
Microsoft wants to make money by charging for features. Unlike Apple, they consider developers to be actual customers. So I trust them to take care of our needs, and trust that their only ultimate motive is to get us to willingly empty our wallets in order to be more productive at work.
They won’t steal our data to sell to political relations companies like Facebook, create walled gardens and charge us 30% to import goods to our own captive customers like Apple, or arbitrarily try to control what can and can’t be done on the internet like Google.
They will just charge money for features like a normal business.
They own part of facebook, and they steal an incredible amount of data from Windows these days.
They have been trying to create a walled garden, with UWP and Microsoft Store. They have done poorly in the market but attempted a number of walled garden platforms.
Windows store is an attempt to charge 30% as Apple did.
They have tried in many ways to exert control on the internet, but have been outcompeted there by Google. One example of their control is SmartScan which scares users away from downloading programs they do not approve - a kind of walled garden. Many of their OSS plays are exerting significant control on users.
>> They won’t steal our data to sell to political relations companies like Facebook, create walled gardens and charge us 30% to import goods to our own captive customers like Apple, or arbitrarily try to control what can and can’t be done on the internet like Google.
I don't mean to unnecessarily defend Microsoft (they're a billion-dollar multinational organization and don't need my help).
It's just that if we want to say they're 'evil', I think they are so in different ways from FAANG. Could they do what Apple or Facebook do? Sure. But doing so would mean giving up their idnetity and becoming a pale version of their competitors.
Why would trust anything to any company? They are not entities that you can trust and then everything is fine. They are face-less entities that turns on a dime if it makes them profit, because that's how capitalism works.
Don't look for companies intentions, look for their actions, as that's the only thing that matters.
Windows Home or Pro have mandatory "telemetry", as do a lot of their applications. It's even in the .NET Core CLI tools and has to be explicitly disabled.
> to sell to political relations companies like Facebook,
They own LinkedIn.
> create walled gardens and charge us 30% to import goods to our own captive customers like Apple,
They tried with Windows S.
> or arbitrarily try to control what can and can’t be done on the internet like Google.
They certainly tried in the 90s until they were stopped by the government. They saw the web (and Java) as an existential threat.
If they haven't been as successful as some of they competitors in doing evil in particular areas, that's not for lack of trying.
I'm not sure anyone really enjoys working with Visual Studio anymore. It was compelling, back in the day, when I was doing desktop apps. But for web development I just don't think it has any real edge over other tools in this space.
In my experience it's also a resource hog. I have to quit and restart it every so often to keep it from bogging everything down.
I should also note that modern Visual Studio is way too heavy. Just compare it with another leader of commercial IDEs - JetBrains. Now, with latest Clion and Rider they rival VS while being more modern and sleeker. Not to say they are crossplatform.
Open source is a philosophy and ideology. Software freedoms are important.
People who release some software as open source and some software as proprietary don't believe in software freedoms. You can't mix and match without philosophical inconsistency.
IMO free software is a philosophy and an ideology. Microsoft's actions (proprietary VSCode extensions, crippling dotnet) are designed to generate goodwill, but hurt the freedom of its users anyway.
There are a few scenarios where it breaks. UWP and Xamarin is dicey. Ironically, it hasn’t been able to edit android layouts involving ConstraintLayout and a few other common layouts/views for a few releases now (ironic because they also make Android studio, which has best in class android layout editing).
Visual Studio is great for the common platforms/languages, but as soon as you try going cross platform or adding unloved platforms (UWP, Xamarin) it gets bad. Unfortunately, those also happen to be the things Rider is bad at.
I honestly don't really like VSCode or see the hype. To me it feels very clunky. I'm spoiled with IntelliJ but I also use regular Visual Studio Notepad++ and Vim and I've Xcode in the old days, and all seemed better than VSCode.
#1 issue is that the extensions are all written in TypeScript and run in the background. When I click to go to a definition, rename, run, or even save, I get that "progress bar" and it takes at least a second. A lot of extensions are also buggy. Vs a "real" IDE like IntelliJ or Xcode, which does those operations almost instantly with significantly less bugs.
If VSCode isn't a "real" IDE, then it competes with other text-editors like Notepad++, Vim (not counting advanced versions like Spacemacs), etc. But those are way faster and less cluttered because text editing is all they try to do.
> I honestly don't really like VSCode or see the hype. To me it feels very clunky.
It's funny because I've been trying WebStorm and it brings my i9 16" MacBook to a crawl so VSCode feels much "faster". It doesn't help that simple operations like renaming anything are multi-step processes or are just apparently missing (no apparent way to delete a file or visit its parent folder from the command palette)
I agree with the rest. VSCode to me is just a little step up from Sublime Text for UI and base features, but it's still a far cry from proper IDEs like WebStorm (of which I like the proper refactoring features)
I've felt that VSCode (and Sublime, etc..) are all text editors when you download them.
Then you install extensions/plugins to move them slightly more towards the direction of IDE.
I see text editors as fast. IDEs as slow but full of features. This allows you to find a middle ground that works best for you. That is as long as you don't do the rookie mistake of installing 100 extensions, 90% that you'll never use but you read about them in a blog & they sound awesome! Kind of like we all do for books, videos, etc.. Someday I'll use them!
> I see text editors as fast. IDEs as slow but full of features.
Me too. The problem with VSCode (and Atom and maybe Sublime) is that even basic IDE features are slow are buggy. And when I'm using an IDE, I constantly use "basic" features like jump to definition, find definition, rename, etc.
IntelliJ is impressive in that you can type, rename, type, jump to definition, rename, etc. and the operations are so fast that they don't disrupt your flow. Vs in VSCode where the operations will pile up in the background. Not to mention, IntelliJ's operations are usually successful, but VSCode's are usually not.
If VSCode could do basic things like jump to definition and rename properly, while still being super fast, then it would be really useful. But idk if it's just me but even in TypeScript I don't get those capabilities.
Not sure if it's you or me. I have a few extensions installed. But I'm fairly confident, especially in TypeScript, that F12 on Windows will jump me to any definition. If I click F12 on code that defines a class or React component, it pops up a window showing me different files & code that is using said class/component.
VSCode extension are written in Typescript but most of them rely on a language server for things like refactoring, type hints, code completion etc. These language servers run as native process (written in Go, C# etc), so are (roughly) as fast as your machine is.
If these operations take over a second it may be an issue with your machine or install of VS Code
The Visual Studio Code thing is kind of a shame. It seems like a variant of "embrace, extend, extinguish" inasmuch as things like Atom exist (which microsoft also owns, womp womp, but didn't for 3 years after Atom started). It competes in the space, keeps competitors weak by being the best so that it gets all of the users and mind-share and resources, but doesn't go all of the way with them because it could compete with their proprietary products...so while being the best is a good thing, it's not a good thing when it creates a monopoly-like product in a space good enough to suck up landscape resources so that no viable competitors not under Microsoft's thumb could ever start approaching parity with their proprietary products.
Definitely dents Microsoft's nascent open-source credit with me and, like so much of Microsoft's history, seems actively damaging in a monumental way to the history of computing itself for Microsoft's benefit.
Not "the best" per se.. Rather "good enough" and part of other tools the customers already use, while keeping them free so it becomes a matter of having to spend extra $$$ for another product.
Take Teams for example. It's a pig of an app IMO. Slow (takes almost a minute to start on my otherwise-fast M1 Mac), extremely high memory use, constant errors "Oops something went wrong + cute pic of ice cream", a mess visually and not dense enough UI. They focus all their time on adding new features rather than optimising. They also focus very strongly on the "for everyone", trying to be a jack of all trades, master of none.
Slack does a much better job at team collaboration IMO. Especially for tech users, it's fast, shows a lot in small screen space and isn't as heavy (though I really miss the IRC bridge!). But Teams comes for free with O365 and integrates fully with that ecosystem. So no hassle with integrating with your ID Provider etc, it's just plug and play. So if you'd want to have slack at work you'd have to make an unreasonably strong business case for all the extra cost and work.
Another example: Sharepoint. I doubt you could find anyone who would consider Sharepoint best at anything. Yet it's still used heavily in favour of other options, because it's again free if you're already in the MS ecosystem, and it integrates with all the other tools like OneDrive and Teams (both basically just layers on top of Sharepoint). So even if you're not using sharepoint, you're using sharepoint :P
I do agree they are the best at the VS Code niche. But usually this is not their game, they go for 'good enough'. Maybe it's because their developers dogfood VS Code so they couldn't stand it being slow :)
For example, VS Code is highly optimised and doesn't suffer the performance drawbacks that usually come with electron. They have optimised the hell out of it. However they never bothered to do the same with Teams, probably because they own that space anyway.
Decisions at large enterprises is large driven by compliance considerations. I once asked why we were picking a specific Microsoft product when it was inferior to the alternative and the answer i got was "The Microsoft platform is approved". So because we had some random Microsoft product we have already paved the way for the dump truck in the future. That's the magic of Microsoft.
To be completely clear, I don't blame the guy. The approval process sucks, so if you get to bypass that, it's a huge win for your own sanity.
It’s tricky though, because they will compete hard on some things if they sense it’s vital. Look at SQL Server, 2005 was probably the most improvement I have ever seen in a single ms release. But once they establish a lead they crank down the dial and cruise.
I think they're arguing that you'd need to make a much better business case for Microsoft competitor products than you would something else, because you're up against the "we already have this at home" response.
Visual Studio Code has also some official extensions that are not open source and the official build contains a few proprietary features by default.
The only thing I like with Visual Studio Code is that they were able to promote a cross text editor way to have auto-completion and other IDE-like features, thanks to the Language Server Protocol. Now I can use these features in Vim and Kate.
> Visual Studio Code has also some official extensions that are not open source and the official build contains a few proprietary features by default.
I don't understand how that is remotely ok. VSCode's main binary links statically against Blink (as it uses Electron) which is under LGPL, at the very minimum they should provide a way to relink that binary as per LGPL requirements.
I don't think there s a static linking going on there, else it would be impossible to use Electron for closed source software. Though it is used for things like Discord.
Unfortunately there are extensions & features that (last I checked) only work in VSCode but not VSCodium. 'Remote Development' extension was the one I found out was apparently closed source.
That one is based on "proper" VisualStudio's remote development features, so it originated from a closed source product. Having observed that multiple times, I assume that open sourcing it is a major effort as this probably includes some third party code or patent licenses or something which prevent open sourcing. At least I don't see the business case Microsoft would play there in keeping it closed but freely available.
But who knows.
And: That aside the role Microsoft nowadays plays in the open source world is reason for concern, while their current actions are mostly positive.
The business case is a combination of Discretionary Pricing, and Moat - those are the business school names for the strategies you can look up if you like..
The Discretionary pricing comes in the Tiers, while the Moat is provided by VS Code reducing the chance of real competition against Tier 1 or 2.
The removal of hot reload from VS Code is to provide differentiation between Tier 2 & 3, to drive customers to paid versions.
--
Tier 1 .. Visual Studio Enterprise - expensive
Tier 2 .. Visual Studio - low medium cost for a business
Tier 3 .. Visual Studio Code - 'free' in exchange for your info (via telemetry) and reduces the chance of a truly open competitor challenging the above tiers. This one must walk a line between being less useful than above tiers so there's value to buy them, while being more useful than other 'free' competition in the short term so they attract mindshare away from other OSS that might otherwise grow to challenge the higher Tiers
VSC being marketed as open source is certainly a grey area (there are arguments both in favor and against), but it's not a bad situation as it seems.
IntelliJ IDEA is a competitive "open source based" product, with a significant market share (which qualifies as "viable competitor not under Microsoft's thumb").
VSC's "base open source" product is actually equally or more capable than IDEA - see VSCodium; its existence is proof that in worst-case scenario, a capable open source editor would still exist. Although there are some omissions, I think that given the MIT license, in theory a competitor could also build a series of commercial plugins - if I'm correct, this would actually be an interesting scenario.
I think the idea here is "dumping". By subsidizing a free, best-in-class editor Microsoft prevents any competing paid options from gaining a foothold. This is not too different from their old strategy with IE.
Making a paid product for something that's a choice of the individual user is a non-starter these days.
What I mean by that is something without network effects. If your company uses Google Docs, you don't have much choice because that's where everything is (modulo apps that can sync to it so you can use a different editor).
For something like VSCode, at the end of the day it's still just a text editor. My use of VSCode doesn't stop my teammate from using vim.
For something like that, do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is at most companies to get them to buy something? The issue isn't even if it's $5 or $500. It's just going through the process of figuring out how to buy something, getting approvals, figuring out how to deal with the invoice, etc. Unless I'm already super committed to it, there's no chance when I can simply download any number of free options out there.
Even if it's explicit policy at a company that employees can expense a text editor or IDE, a large proportion of people will still never bother. I saw the "Please buy Sublime Text!" pop-up all the time at my last job, and that was at a small startup where everyone knew the company was happy to pay for it.
I understand what you mean, of course. I am not sure if anti-dumping was ever applied to products given away for free with zero unit cost economics. If applied incorrectly, Apple and Microsoft could argue that Linux and Linux-based OSes being free is illegal!
Dumping operates by selling below cost. If you sell below cost and your competitors don't, nobody buys from them but they still have to pay rent and the salaries of their factory workers if they want to maintain the ability to resume production, which drives them out of business. If you sell below cost and your competitors match you, they lose money on every sale, which drives them out of business.
Then you have no competitors and can start charging the monopoly price, and no one tries to enter the market for fear you'll start dumping again.
Charging nothing for a product with no unit cost doesn't work like that. You're not forcing anyone to sell at a loss and the intent isn't to raise prices after they're gone.
The concern there is that you could come to dominate the market (even if the price remains zero) and then leverage that into other markets. If one IDE has more users than any of the others (market dominance) and it integrates with the vendor's hosting service and their proprietary APIs for their proprietary operating system and their app store and payment systems, that's more like tying than dumping.
Doesn't this describe a lot of significant software in the present?
IE and Skype were criticized for being terrible pieces of software, and people were desperate for something to come and disrupt their target markets. Now Chrome and Discord are being criticized for being so functionally superior to their predecessors - as well as every other option - that nobody is left with a choice anymore.
Developers don't want to choose anything besides Chrome because nearly everyone has been convinced to use it from the quality of the product, so sites are broken on other browsers, causing more people to move to Chrome. Critical information found nowhere else on the internet is locked within Discord, because almost everyone wants to use Discord, so you have no choice but to also use Discord to communicate with those people and view that information.
In the process, Discord becomes the sole owner of that crucial information, and Chrome becomes the single deciding factor in how web standards are developed.
It's a kind of a weird move from Microsoft. Is Satya Nadella
- the man that pushed Microsoft towards Open Source - still Microsoft's CEO or the position was take over by bad guys and girls like Julia Liuson? It's kid of a Dr Jekyll vs Mr Hyde.
You can not have the cake and still eat it. I guess the push of .NET and other tools towards Open Source would yield motre bennefits in the long term than trying to castrate it in the hope they will sell a few more Visual Studio licenses.
The company I work for is developing a big product using .NET. But it does it because it runs on Linux and it can nicely be integrated with many open source tools. If .NET wasn't open sourced, I guess they wouldn't have used .NET.
I used Visual Studio until now because I genuinely prefer the experience, not because I was forced into it because some features were taken off from open source .NET tools. I do understand that people want to develop on other OS-es than Windows and using other IDEs than Visual Studio. And Microsoft has to understand it too if they want .NET to continue to be successful.
NET only has two paths: to continue being open source and to flourish or to die. >NET running only on Windows and/or with only good tooling available on Windows will die. If they push .NET towards being closed - it's their right, they pay for the development - they might win a small amount of money on short term but they will lose everything in the long term. I hope they aren't idiots.
Back in .NET Core 2.1 days, I did a porting project from .NET Framework into Java, because the customer in question wanted to go into UNIX (Red-Hat Linux more specifically), and .NET Core required a rewrite anyway, they decided to take the opportunity to move away from MS ecosystem, as they were fed up with rewrites.
This kind of decisions kind of confirms those actions.
I get the impression that its current state is something like CSS in the era of Internet Explorer 4 to 6: there's a published specification which Microsoft is nominally behind, but the de facto standard is "What Visual Studio Code does", and there's nontrivial divergence between the two.
Can anyone who works with LSP indicate whether that impression is accurate?
LSP appears to be alive and well with editors that are not VS Code. The entire point of LSP is to decouple the text editor from the language, and it works.
If VS Code has more support for LSP it is because Microsoft has poured money into it, invented LSP to begin with, and popularized it with VS Code to begin with.
Individual people can be trusted, but trusting a corporation is a contradiction in terms. The leadership of any team can be replaced pretty quickly and goals can pivot on a dime. Or, like with Sun, the company may be acquired by another with completely different objectives.
If you want commitments from a company, get it in writing (in this case in the license).
I also don't get this part:
> They won’t develop cool features like these any more and most frighteningly, they won’t accept pull requests or community contributions which could add these features back into the SDK - and that is a bleak outlook for the open source community in .NET.
What stops someone from forking the SDK and adding this functionality? Or are there non-open-source components this all relies on?
> What stops someone from forking the SDK and adding this functionality? Or are there non-open-source components this all relies on?
I've felt the benefits of Microsoft's OSS push over the last decade, and I've been an advocate for their work. As such, I've never felt the need to run VSCodium, and I've been OK with sending Microsoft telemetry from my VSCode install (though I would prefer it was opt-in, rather than opt-out).
But now they are trying to have their cake and eat it too - they want to keep up the "developers, developers, developers" mantra, because they can deeply their tooling with Azure and nudge devs in it's direction. But they also still want to maximise revenue from their commercial IDE, Visual Studio. And as a result, they are half-arsing both goals, a strategy that is absolutely doomed.
And you know what, for a feature like `dotnet watch`, it's just so completely unnecessary, as VS would still be a very different and vastly more capable IDE than VSCode. This really feels like some high-head in the background is pulling new strings, and I really don't like it.
I'm also 100% certain that if `dotnet watch` is discontinued, someone will reverse engineer it (very easy with dotnet!) and release it as a third party dotnet global tool, which makes this whole situation even more pointless.
I hope VSCodium does start to add in functionality that Microsoft is trying to keep for themselves, starting with the dotnet watch code that was written and not merged - extra functionality would be a very compelling reason to use VSCodium.
That's why Microsoft can't "own" open source. So they decided to "own" the open source developer by owning the source repository he uses, owning the editor, owning one of the most popular languages (Typescript) he uses, the command line shell, he uses along with grabbing all the Linux commands and make them available on their own platform.
This is not about proprietary code (owning the code), anymore, but about owning the platform and making people use it. I doubt, they have a clear plan, right now, instead they hope, that it will play out positively for them, in the future. A few years from now, I wouldn't be surprised, if you'd need a Microsoft account to log into Github.
I agree that they probably don't have a clear plan here. I would speculate that they saw the writing on the wall that Linux and OSS had won, and they just started doing anything and everything to gain influence in that space.
And there's no company I trust less not to abuse that influence once they see the opportunity to use it in an anti-competitive way without consequences.
The plan, as near as I can tell, is watching Google leverage Chrome and Android user base into votes for standards.
Microsoft finally realized standards and interoperability was the future. They also realized that a requirement of being able to extract profit in that future was having power to influence standards.
Consequently, open source tools (and more importantly, the dev/user share that comes with them) get Microsoft votes. Either explicitly or via mind share.
And when it's a corporate priority or matter of survival, they use those votes to advance Microsoft's interest.
We've seen this with Chrome / web standards for years now. Most of the time it's good for users, but sometimes it's just that important to corporate reveneue.
I mean MS basically invented leveraging market share to drive web standards. IE was famous for flaunting W3C and implementing things their own way, much to the chagrin of web developers even to this day. It's the kind of behavior which got their hand slapped for anti-trust in the 90's.
It's hard to say it's "copying google", it's more of a return to form now that the regulatory environment seems to have relaxed on anti-trust.
That makes two of us. But if your takeaway from the 90s was 'W3C was in the right and timely, and MS decided to go another way just because,' then we have very different memories.
>>This is not about proprietary code (owning the code), anymore, but about owning the platform and making people use it.
FOSS, early on created a whole bunch of concepts and ideology that was very useful for framing the issue. Back then, it did make sense to focus on open vs proprietary code license etc.
That was a long time ago though, and most of what we know about the software industry wasn't known yet. These days we know software's best businesses are about control and power. OS can be used for strategic commodities, while convenient bottlenecks like app stores, cloud platforms or key dev tools.
A lot casual assumptions got made about links between norms at GNU, linux, etc and what OS is.
We need an update to OSS language. What does freedom, or openness mean today? As it stands, it's hard to say whether or not such and such violates such values, because the values are vague and unarticulated. We can fall back to 1980s FOSS, but that's somewhat dated.
I have been primarily a Java/Go developer. I like C# as a language and have been actively following development of .net for some time with intention to play a little deep with asp/blazor for some side project.
If now Linux/Mac become 2nd class citizen I am no longer interested in the platform as no way I'll move servers to Windows and no near plan to change my dev machine to Windows. So better to drop .net as an option.
I think they cannot be trusted in the long term. Even when they start out without ulterior motives, as the company evolves over the years, the ulterior motives start to creep in - Slowly and predictably, the tech becomes proprietary again. Vendor lock-in is in Microsoft's DNA. They know how to add lock-in slowly and quietly over many years. That's a big part of why I'm saying away from Microsoft-controlled language ecosystems like TypeScript. I can see Microsoft tightening its grip; how they achieve lock-in and shift towards proprietary is so subtle, most people don't see it coming until it's too late. I don't know if even the Microsoft employees who are implementing the changes see it coming; it seems to be subconscious; second nature to them.
The problem is VSCode isn't open source either. Code-OSS is the open source version from microsoft.
The extensions owned by Microsoft are proprietary.
So you can't run the c/c++, pylance, remote ssh, remote containers, c#, etc extensions in open source builds of Code - OSS like VSCodium.
And for some of those, if you manually try to install the extensions using the .vsix file, they fail because the extensions are hardcoded to work only on VSCode builds signed by MS.
Pylance being proprietary is so disappointing, given it's the spiritual successor to Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS). PTVS was an open source Visual Studio extension, which later was ported to VSCode.
90% of PyLance is open source though, via the PyRight extension upon which its based. I'm not saying it's not disappointing its proprietary, but it's sorta inline with the "open core" philosophy that a lot of corporate open source work aligns itself with.
Ay, you're not wrong. But even granting them that, they disappointingly say “The Pyright extension for VSCode ... is not guaranteed to be ... maintained long-term.”
The C# extension is open source, and is run in VSCodium. It's a fork that just swaps out the debugger component, which is a drop-in replacement since it's a binary download. The whole stack otherwise - OmniSharp for VSCode, OmniSharp-Roslyn bindings, and the underlying Roslyn language language services - are all OSS.
The only parts of the C/C++ extension that are proprietary are parts like intellisense, which were lifted wholesale out of visual studio. Which is to say, they were never open source to begin with. All the work the cpptools extension team has done has been open source.
I don't think people will swap out VS Code for the full fledged Visual Studio. The people using Code for .Net Core work will likely spend the money on Rider. Everyone else will be kind of puzzled at the comparison; it seems pretty heavy for Python (or Ruby, Clojure, etc.)
Looks like Microsoft has figured out where their feet are and are taking careful aim.
Generally yeah, but as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28969338 Microsoft also actively refrain from adding features to the dotnet sdk in order to have less people to use them, VSCode included, in order to stuff the same features into VS.
I'm honestly a bit surprised that people are still using Visual Studio (sans Code) these days. It was a decent IDE ten years ago, but nowadays I'd put it far down the list (not least because it means that you have to develop primarily on Windows which is... uhm... yeah, no thanks). Is the VS experience much better when you are using C# instead of C++?
If you're writing C# you basically only have Visual Studio and JetBrains Rider to chose between, and seemingly Microsoft is trying to get more people to use Visual Studio so lots of features are being added to Visual Studio instead of the SDK.
C# support in Visual Studio Code is abysmal, hence no one uses it even if they use Visual Studio Code for other languages.
Trust is a weird word. Talk is cheap, what are they doing?
I think Microsoft has been behaving pretty well lately and that's worth something. With that said, I still would never "trust" them.
I don't understand people being spooked about Microsoft and open source. I've always viewed open source as a greased pig. Being open means anybody is free to fork and go elsewhere so the fact that they don't must mean a need is being met.
I think the bigger threat these days is everybody being dazzled by top to bottom closed solutions like Apple's processors. I wonder if other companies will follow suit to keep up and start vertically integrating their chips too.
As a former Microsoft employee, and as someone who has been a fan of post-Satya Microsoft, this has been a very disappointing development. Microsoft needs to stop cashing trust for profits and that won't happen until they see the PR losses cost more than profit gains of such actions.
The better question is: Can we trust Microsoft with .Net Open Source?
Open source that is somewhat close to a core of a what a company is doing is always a fine line to walk. See: ElasticSearch, MongoDB, MySQL, Databricks' Deltalake, Oracle's GraalVM, et al.
This development is (generally) very unfortunately, and for those using .Net very annoying.
But let's not forget, overall Open Source is great, and it's great that Microsoft has (finally) turned in that direction. There are a lot of other, successful Microsoft Open Source projects.
I understand that MS is still here to make money. Everybody wants to do that. What i don't understand is to risk the good will of the open source coummunity, by denying a core flagship feature another competitor (flutter/google) has included for free. I donk think this is a smart choice, even if i am in it for the money.
So now it didn't stand and they rolled it back, we can denigrate people for bringing up EEE? How about no denigration, you explain how Microsoft removing a feature from a Microsoft product preview was ever going to extinguish anything? Or how Microsoft putting some features for-money in Visual Studio is EEE but JetBrains charging for features in Rider isn't?
That is, say you are a .NET/Linux dev today, you fork the .NET framework under its MIT license as of October 2021, and Microsoft never add another feature to .NET for free, {blank}, then you can never use your fork again because it has been extinguished. What happens in the {blank}, in your view?
Absolutely not. Look at Microsoft for 20 years and you'll see all the red flags showing up. Owning github, vscode and linkedin is yet another EEE strategy.
Call me naive or uninformed, but I think everyone is overreacting.
I have been using .NET for many years now, preferring VS Code or similar editors for work where I am totally in control of what is going on behind the scenes. I have been extremely satisfied with the direction Microsoft has been taking .NET and also GitHub/VS Code in recent years.
The hot reload feature has been introduced in .NET 6 preview builds - emphasis on "preview" builds. I personally haven't used the feature a lot but have heard it worked great for a lot of developers. And now with .NET 6 GA date quickly approaching, Microsoft is wrapping up the .NET 6 release. This of course means moving any unfinished work to .NET 7, such as full AOT that I was personally looking very forward to. And even MAUI etc...
So after reading their latest blog post on their decision to move the hot reload feature to only Visual Studio for .NET 6 GA, I quickly understood they probably just didn't have time to finish the feature / reach an acceptable level of quality for the dotnet CLI, so they just moved it for a later release - like any other unfinished feature.
Of course this upset a lot of developers that were already using it successfully in their workflows, but let's be honest now, it was always a preview feature. You shouldn't take preview features for granted. I do agree, however, that Microsoft could've handled this better - they could've added like a "preview/experimental feature" warning when using hot reload via the CLI or something and kept the feature there as is - but I'm guessing they wanted to keep their CLI clean of unfinished features. It's not like they said they will never release it to everyone - just that it will be available through VS and VS for Mac for .NET6 GA.
And if Microsoft truly did this for their own "evil" reasons, why was this feature available in the preview builds to begin with?
It's barely been a few days since the blog post, and the backlash is already huge - people are already losing trust in Microsoft and they haven't even given a response yet.
i think the differents is the lak of technical responses on the github issue from ms employees on why this was cut. This leaves only politcal reasons, which the normal ms staff don't make.
I agree. It is indeed a bit worrying. I am guessing everyone is quiet because Microsoft wants to give a single unified response. And needs some time to prepare and make a decision.
I just hope this will get resolved soon without any issues and we can move on.
The answer to that question has always and will always be no, and anyone who ever thought otherwise is a sucker, frankly. This is a company whose entire ethos and business model was built from the ground up to be about proprietary software for proprietary software’s sake. It is a company that has consistently tried to leverage any foothold it has in any space to wrap up tools and force people to pay for them. It is a company founded by Bill Gates of “open letter to hobbyists” fame, who said “Own the API”, who in the COVID crisis went and talked a vaccine producer out of opening their vaccine IP. No company can be fully trusted, but if you ever believe MSFT is working on FOSS without an agenda to harm it you’re a fool, and if you think contributors or even department heads within the company will or even can change this you don’t understand how working for a big company works
As someone who was an avid swift developer, I can see how people can get attracted to building OSS for .NET or Swift, and how it might even be necessary in many cases given the lack of feature update by the companies. But, after leaving the world, I just really hope more devs see that they aren't valued by these companies for building such open source, and in continuing to validate their products through continued fixes, we are only making them stronger. Maybe I have a very pessimistic view, but I've started looking very literally at how companies make money from any open source work they do before using it so I know what they want of me in the future and to see if I support their business model or not. Its for this reason I picked using Singularity over Docker because I just know that a federal lab + contractors for scientific work will actually stress test and continue paying for the software while docker, who ultimately doesn't then a profit yet, may either get bought by one of the FAANG+ or have to start aggressively curtailing access.
Ah, the eternal cycle of: Microsoft does something bad, then people move to Linux, then they get dragged by Linux's rough new user experience, then they leave Linux, then things are fine for a while, then people mock Linux users for being paranoid, then Microsoft does something bad...
You can't trust any big corporation with anything, period.
Nor Microsoft, nor any other.
It's not a matter of morality, it's a matter of scale. At their scale, the entity takes priority over individuals, and it will always do what's good for the corporation, and only the corporation, unless obligated to.
In a capitalist society, this means it will always do what's profitable unless a stronger player, competition or the state, strongarm them into doing the right thing.
So no, you can't trust Microsoft with open source.
But right now, it happens Microsoft interest and the open source community are aligned. So keep your eyes open, don't put all your eggs in the same basket, assume it will change. Certainly don't let them control your stack.
But do enjoy the ride. They have skills and resources, FOSS can benefit from it.
I would be pretty skeptical of anything that is owned by the devdiv division (github, dotnet, etc). It seems like they are still looking for ways to replace the revenue they lost from the classic VS model.
As for anything in the Azure org, I wouldn't be too worriedT They just want to wrap a managed service around an OSS project and call it "contributing to the community". It seems like there was some OSS innovation coming in from the deis acquisition, but years later all msft got from them was the helm dumpster fire, and I believe the founder just left to go to Digital Ocean.
The Kinvolk acquisition is interesting also, but I have a feeling that it will pan out the same way.
This is quite issue with any big product - open source never found widely applicable model of operating that isn't dependent on some companies.
Linux relies heavily on corporations using it.
Gecko is dead without Mozilla - if Mozilla bankrupts, no one has enough manpower to develop Gecko.
Even if code is GPL-licensed and in ongoing development, main contributor can easily force their design choices on downstream forks. If you redesign some system, downstream forks have to reimplement their changes on top of refactored code. And they don't have enough manpower for that.
Well, governance of open source is probably not solvable, like most of human relations.
The problem is when an open source project is owned and controlled by one large player. It's much healthier to have diverse stakeholders with different interests, none of which is completely in control, as is the case with Linux.
When I was talking about "unsolvable", I meant there is no single "best way to do it". All choices have tradeoffs.
"One large player" can make hard, but neccesary choices. Multiple stakeholders can have conflicting interests, so they can stick with conservative way.
One large player can use its control in ways detrimental to users. Multiple stakeholders can go with incremental changes that benefit everyone involved.
Idk I get what you are saying, but at least for me personally, if I am investing in making something part of my workflow, it makes me really uncomfortable knowing it's fate is in the hands of only one corporation who's interests can easily become un-aligned with my own. Slow progress can be frustrating, but it's better than being left out in the cold from one day to another.
JetBrains did their own Hot Reload feature for Linux. The community is working as it should. The problem is everyone wants premium features for free. HotReload is a new feature, existing folks don’t have it now. If you want it on Linux, it’s going to cost $13 a month for a Rider license. Otherwise, keep developing without HotReload as devs have been for the past 5 years for free.
Nope. Linux users care that they use Linux. They don't care if anybody else happens to use it or doesn't. There's no 'Linux Corporation' that has to maintain sales to survive.
What people prefer is not a popularity contest. If that was the case, looking at it from a cars analogy, nobody would ever buy 'unpopular' cars like Lamborginis or even Mercedes, they'd only buy Fords.
The chaos I'm getting with vcpkg at present seems to say not! I love the idea of vcpkg and it used to make life so much easier as I gave my students a list of packages to install for their homework and all was fine. Recently packages seem to get updated and break, there is no "easy" way to specify versions of packages. And in general it takes months to fix simple bugs. There seems to be over 1K issues at present. I know it's a difficult project but still could be done better.
No, they started copying Google's strategy, first become the infrastructure then exploit your position. Stop giving them the whole open source infrastructure for free.
And that is the promise of Open Source. That it will endure as long as there are individuals willing to carry it. Sad that Microsoft dropped "dotnet watch". Maybe it might come back in a different form.
John Carmack managed to release an unlocked Oculus OS going against his Facebook paymasters. That was probably an ordeal. Maybe somebody within Microsoft can fight the good fight and bring Open Source .NET to the masses. Maybe not today, but someday...
I would like to see a better model for funding FLOSS development. Maybe efficient cryptocurrency microtransactions or something like that. Every time I hit your repo I pay you $0.001, or every time I run your package I pay you the same. Voluntarily, of course.
I want to do this now, and I do have recurring donations for some projects, but it could be frictionless and automatic.
Given most indie F/OSS is on github where MS gets maybe a few pennies from clicks, I guess the case has been settled. Notable exceptions being software by ASF, LSF, and a couple other orgs.
To the person who downvoted me: I'd like to hear some arguments. Perhaps you don't need to. But that's irrelevant -- the world at large does. That's the main point of the post, too.
I'd be interested in seeing a similar list of this except in the Google/Chromium space, but it's probably less obvious since they maintain Chromium themselves..
I’m kinda surprised by the level of naïveté displayed by the community. Of _course_ there’s infighting.
Do you think the VS team is gonna see their product value be eroded by free tools and take it lying down?
Absolutely every company has infighting. The bigger you are the more infighting and disagreement. Infighting about product development prioritisation, marketing budget to promote new features etc etc.
When companies are selling multiple products, some that overlap in their usefulness to customers you can bet there’ll be infighting.
VS Code is a wonderful tool. You can’t expect that MS will make it 99% as good as a paid version.
> Do you think the VS team is gonna see their product value be eroded by free tools and take it lying down?
VSCode features can't make VS any less useful. They only make it less ‘valuable’ in an abstract, market sense. Why would the people actually making VS give a shit about that unless they're larping as their bosses? Or by ‘the team’ do you actually mean something like ‘whatever VP is in charge of the team’?
Too much FUD and overreaction from people who dont even use Microsoft products here.
MS simply said they are prioritizing one particular feature for launch in 2 week for their premium (paid) IDE. Another company has already implemented this feature in a competitive IDE (JetBrains Rider). Mac support coming soon. Community can work on that feature themselves or wait til after the launch in 2 weeks for VS Code support.
> I know what you think. You might think I’m reading too much in-between the lines here, but trust me on this one that I am not wrong.
No, I don't think I will trust you as telling me to trust you is not a valid qualifier. And, I do think you're reading too much in between the lines. For example
> but more importantly they also won’t deny it.
Please stop with low effort clickbait.
There are no mentions of all the positive outcomes that have emerged from their open source shift. In other words, it does focus too much on recent drama rather than putting this in the context of all their contributions.
Nor, considering the title of the article, has there been any consideration for the overall ecosphere of the tech giants that are playing in this space. If you ask the question, then look at who the others are. I cannot think of two worse companies to 'trust' than Oracle and Apple and represent the antithesis of openness. There are existing contributors, Google and Facebook, who do plenty and can somewhat be trusted considering their nature, and despite their reputation. There you will find a similar pattern, some things are open and some are proprietary Looking at the context of their contribution over the past few years I would put them firmly in the latter category. The answer to the headline is: yes, somewhat.
My creep alarm went off a bit when I recently started a project to test the waters with TypeScript. I was asking on a forum how to deal with native JS dependencies without types, and he answer I got was "Are you using VSCode? It will just find the community maintained type packages for you".
It seems to me that VSCode's "just click the button to solve my problem" style of UX makes it very easy for developers to become reliant on proprietary workflows without even realizing it. If one were to pursue an EEE strategy, this would not be a bad way to start.