I've said this before and I'm sure others have noticed. Microsoft's focus is 'developers developers developers' whether it's for Visual Studio, or Azure Cloud, if you want software built for your platform you should cater to developers. I also said if I were JetBrains I'd worry about Microsoft's new agenda, they're going to have to take on Microsoft's new route. If Visual Studio itself (not Code) becomes cross-platform in the future that would be a huge blow for IntelliJ and other IDE's that JetBrains makes, maybe not at first but eventually. From my own experience Python Tools for Visual Studio and PyCharm are two of the best IDE's I've ever had the pleasure of using for Python, if that level of detail went into other IDE's that would be fantastic. Not to down other work others have done.
Incidentally, JetBrains is starting out with Project Rider (a C# IDE).
I've been working professionally with Xamarin for the past month, honestly I'm shocked how half-baked Xamarin Studio is, both in terms of stability and features. (Since we develop for iOS, we use Macs and VS is not an option).
Of course now that Microsoft has stepped in all the way, things may turn around, but my feeling is that the best window of opportunity for JetBrains would be to provide compelling Xamarin tooling on non-Windows platforms. That's the weak spot of their mammoth competitor as far as C# goes
JetBrains need to get better --far better-- at providing support. In fact, I think they need to have full-time, US-based, knowledgeable support. I've been using their tools for years. We own a few full-product-line subscriptions yet every single time we have to ask for support I know it will be a disappointing experience.
We don't do it that frequently, maybe two to four times a year. And, when we do, you can be the problem was well researched and we simply ran into a wall. Between the time it takes for them to get back to you and some of the answers that come back, well, it's less than ideal. This is harsh, but sometimes I think "you might as well have asked me to re-install Windows to fix the problem".
What ends-up happening is that we will generally google the heck out of the problem, post it on SO and experiment and sometimes figure it out. In other cases you just give up and live with the issues.
On the developer side MS has far better support and the community of developers using their tools is much larger, which means you have a higher probability of finding one or more answers to your problem.
Still. Love JetBrains tools. I just wish they'd take support seriously.
That's possible, true, but the company deemed it too expensive to supply everyone with two computers and then pay for VS licenses on the top of Xamarin licensing (already rather pricey)
As a former manager IT KILLS ME. We spend millions on salaries but we can't spend thousands on hardware? A $700 mac mini is less then a week of salary. Heck the license fees are more then a mac mini.
This same thing works for OS X running on VMware on a Windows host. While it's not officially supported, it works and is pretty simple to get up and running.
The VM? A coworker had no problems installing OS X in VMWare for his pet project, less than a day.
Visual Studio? This is Microsoft that we're talking about. I haven't done this or seen anyone do it, but I've read articles and it seems as though it has the usual straightforward qualities.
Well of course Vs is an option. You just use View models and cover them with unit tests. Then you sacrifice one of your developers on the altar of Jobs and force him to implement your iOS code.
:) The idea is that everybody works on Android and iOS alike, no specialization on the team. And the UI itself (Xamarin.Forms) takes the bulk of our development time, we're running into so many quirks, and the cross-platform abstraction is very leaky unfortunately. So your recommendation may be good, but I don't think it would pan out in our particular scenario. Especially since the team consists of people with no prior exposure to Xamarin (C#/MVVM devs + me, an Android dev with some half-forgotten familiarity with C#), so we've been learning on the job a lot
Yea, I agree that the IntelliJ IDEA and VS (not code) are the two best IDEs out there.
The three major factors I would rank the IDEA over VS.
1. Extensibility, its more likely to support X language
2. Crossplatform, it actually runs on my platform
3. Its UI doesn't change drastically every few years. This is such an underrated thing IMO. Neither VS or IDEA are pretty IDEs, they both are actually butt ugly. They don't need to be. But VS goes thru so many visual changes and reorganizations, its the same reason why I don't use Office. I'm not sure many ppl view this as a bad thing however. I often find MS fans loving to brag about how "modern" their software always looks, even if it still looks just as shitty as the old one lol.
I think the key to UX design is that it's very different to make a website or an application that is occasionally used than it is to make an application where most users use it 40h/week. I really welcome that ms keep iterating on the VS UI, and it doesn't matter if it slows me down the first days if it helps me over the coming year.
And now with the one you excluded (VS Code), we are seeing them making a serious move on your two big advantages of IDEA over VS.
They have apparently built a lot of the "big" VS in C#, and they have apparently architected VS Code with a C# runtime on top of Electron to make it easier to port big pieces of VS into VS Code.
The more developers they convert to VS Code, which is a lot deeper than just an editor for C# and Typescript, the more influence they will have on development patterns on all platforms. This seems like a bigger push than just "make Windows the best platform for developing for all platforms". They're attempting to get devs who continue working on Mac and Linux to switch to their dev tools.
I've used both, but I'm forced to use VS at work. I think that its changes are for the better. It's definitely a strength. There are also very cool tools for source control; code reviews, continuous integration, bug tracking.
In addition, you can see a reference counter above your classes that offer a quick jump to where your class is being referenced from. It is majorly helpful.
The down side is when Visual Studio breaks. Sometimes, it caches files, causing strange functionality. There is this thing called MsBuild that can break your package management. It defaults to an auto-merge, which is the worst possible thing to do to your team mates.
I don't find VS ugly at all, but I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Yeah I stopped using MS Office when the "ribbon" was introduced, and on the rare occasions when I have to use it now it always seems to look completely different from what I remember, I'm completely lost and I find that common functions seem to be utterly undiscoverable.
#3 must be the most underrated software feature ever. Too bad that it is at odds with the model of making money by selling new software revisions. Maybe the slow move to paid subscriptions will spare us the hassle of re-learning UIs for no good reason when we are old and grey :)
(How much would i pay for a carefully maintained subscription of Office 97? Well, not that much, but that is more than i paid for office software since)
It's at odds with employees' own agendas as well -- nobody gets promoted for fixing a few bugs. Rearranging buttons, that is something your manager will notice.
I don't understand this hostility. Some change in design is OK. Nobody knows the future so when major new features get introduced or excised, some reorganization makes sense. The "What would you like to do?" In Microsoft office is a simple little textbox that adds a lot of value for casual users I'd say enough to warrant them paying $5 a month for an Office subscription.
The ribbon makes it seem easy to surface features that would otherwise be hidden deep in menus and sub menus.
Of course, UI design is difficult just as doing any work for consumption by others is difficult especially when there is no complete spec. I am not a UI designer but even I can make a UI that I will think is good enough. However, making a UI for others is tough.
Maybe it is just my luck but project managers or owners have always been hesitant to support UI changes. Maybe I've just been lucky to have good managers but I can't recall a single time I've had to make a UI change that wasn't driven by what I thought was a valid business need.
#3 they're not too bad with the darker themes, but to each his own. Eclipse does a bad job at this though, I think they should modernize their UI extensively. Android Studio isn't too ugly and it's based off IntelliJ.
In my opinion eclipse is still a lot better than VS. It is smaller, faster and provides more features. For C++ visual studio is not much better than smart editor. It cannot even find all symbol references (it searches just for text). I also do not like licensing (free version works 30 days and than requires registration with a lot of info about you).
I remember that C# version had totally different project settings window as if created by someone else than the rest of VS. But I haven't used it for some time so maybe it is already fixed.
Microsoft's focus is profit, as it is for every corporation. If someone screams developers, developers it doesn't mean much.
I can remember several instances where developers were nicely screwed by policy and strategy changes, products languages and tools got canceled.
I find that the best strategy for someone that doesn't want to depend on Microsoft's moods is to not use their tools, or at least stick to the ones that have a long history and won't be messed up by strategy changes - that doesn't include C# or .NET
C# and .NET will endure in one form or another, but all these transformations waste developers' time and make their skills obsolete. No thanks, I'd rather learn something and use it more than a couple of years without having it change under me for no good reason.
None of those are C# or .net. You're complaining about frameworks, which really naturally evolve and change over time. It's downright silly to say that because frameworks are changing, the core language will change too.
Well, whose fault is it that all things have .net in their names? I meant the .net frameworks in my original comment (even though the runtime environment changed a lot too, causing pain for deployment - read some old Paint.net blogs to find out more).
My point was that it doesn't matter if c# or .net continue to exist or not, all it matters for me is whether one can count on one's skills being still valuable. My Visual C++, WinAPI (bit WinRT is replacing it) skills are still fine, my C# & .net framework that I learned back in 2006 are nearly useless, because a lot of stuff changed.
Why do companies expect developers to always gobble up whatever they throw over the wall and say "thank you sir, may I have more sir?", as if it's our duty to relearn how to do X for the Nth time, this time with bells and whistles?
More importantly, why do devs like investing in such ephemeral knowledge?
What about community-driven languages that are rapidly evolving? In that case, would you say that the community expects developers to always gobble up whatever is thrown over the wall? (See: web frontend development)
> "as if it's our duty to relearn how to do X for the Nth time, this time with bells and whistles?"
There are a few areas of computing that are fairly stable, if stability of knowledge is your priority, you should seek one of those out.
But in many other areas of computing, our discipline is young and rapidly evolving. Some of that evolution is being driven by a corporate need to sell the next version. But plenty is driven by the rapid evolution in languages and paradigms. And why is that? Because we all know that programming can still be (much) easier, more reliable, more predictable, cheaper, and more fun. This is why many devs, myself included, like investing in "ephemeral" knowledge.
Honestly, I understand that the decay of hard-earned skills is distressing for many people. Not all fields have this characteristic. But in our field, it just comes with the territory.
The web front-end is shooting itself in the foot in a spectacular way and is a pathological example of software entropy. :) Personally I am seeking thay out - the stuff I work on has existed since before I was born and is evolving in quite a rational manner.
I don't mind at all when a language is evolving, that's indeed to be expected and manageable, because one can leverage existing knowledge and augment it. But a lot of change is either driven by corporate interests as you mentioned or by fashion and is disruptive, as in replace X with Y. And it's not clear how Y is more robust or faster, usually it's a mixed bag of pluses and minuses.
You do realize that, although Silverlight and WPF aren't being actually developped ( and transformed into something else). You can keep your XAML skills in the newer platforms.
And Windows Forms still works on the new platforms ( except mobile), so it's not like it broke functionality.
VB 6 Applications still work and that IS a long time ago...
What better way to profit than selling developers the tools they need to build projects? Again, Microsoft is focusing on developers. As for being locked in to their products, it doesn't look like Visual Studio is going anywhere, and as others have said, their stack has been around at least over a decade now. The only newcomer is Visual Studio Code and that is open sourced anyway.
Just because the product isn't going anywhere, doesn't mean the licensing structure isn't going to change. You ready to pay for your monthly VS Studio subscription?
Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?
A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community:
Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.
Here’s how Visual Studio Community can be used in organizations:
An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1MM in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.
The best way to profit is to make it easy for developers to build software that works on their (mobile) platforms. Right now most dev's focus is iOS/Android (at least it's mine). If M$ can make it easy to produce a front end for Windows mobile and reuse all the business/server code then THAT is where they win. Selling dev toolkits doesn't bank anyone billions.
Why do you not include C# or .NET? Both have been going for quite some time and there's a tonne of code in the world depending on both. What strategy changes do you think could affect them?
I agree re: PyCharm being great and comprehensive; atom currently can't hold a candle to all the features. VS isn't an option since I'm on a Mac, and I assume many people who occasionally / more than occasionally develop in Python are in the same boat. If nothing else, it'd be nice to have a second good option for IDEs. As far as it beating PyCharm...we shall see :)
If I had to be honest I'd use either of them. I think they're both really well designed. I would not be against using Pycharm or Python Tools for Visual Studio since they're both really great pieces of software from my personal experience. However, Visual Studio would have the benefit of not running on top of Java which at times can either be slow or "fast enough." At least without proper tweaking.
Microsoft doesn't make its money on Windows licenses. It makes money on Enterprise versions of Office and its various server projects.
The value of a developer's machine is pretty much a rounding error to Microsoft. The value of a developer's output (production and DR instances of server products/Azure services) is immense to Microsoft.
But if developers are using Windows, that means that they're also going to write software for Windows. A lot of the high quality, 3rd party applications that run on OS X come from the fact that the authors had been running Mac for a long time, had a need for something, and turned it into a product. Had those developers been on Windows instead, they might be there. That's what Microsoft wants.
Microsoft wants Azure consumption, SQL Server Enterprise licenses, Office 365 Enterprise seats, Dynamics licenses, and ISV and Cloud Services partners.
They already have the desktop market and it is pennies compared to the income they make from enterprise clients.
What about Amazon? It sounds to me that a large part of the drive toward better dev tools is Microsoft trying to promote its cloud. Amazon has no such relationship with developers. If that becomes a competitive advantage, wouldn't Amazon try to get in?
I've thought about this, or maybe Atlassian or GitHub doing so, or even GitLab, they're all companies that cater to developers and if they acquired JetBrains it would be a move that would keep them on top of their competitors on a new platform, especially Atlassian and GitLab since GitHub at least has Atom (though it suffers performance issues among other things).
We indeed have no plans to acquire Jetbrains. I think they are doing awesome and we probably couldn't afford them. But also we would like to have a development environment that runs online while allowing for browser based and client based editors. Currently we're looking at Koding https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12759
This doesn't change the affordability bit, but IDEA is working on a web hosted IDE. They are rolling it out as an online code review tool first, with nice features like goto definition, but eventually going to full run tests or edit code.
JetBrains are in the middle of a daring switch to SaaS which may or may not work; they face threats from all sides; and they're not exactly a "cloud first" business.
I bet if anyone showed up with a huge bag of cash, they would sell.
As nice as it would be for Microsoft to kind of run those IDE's and toolsets, I think it would be bad for the market altogether, we can't have just one company running every developer offering out there, competition is good. I hope someone else buys them out though, just to see how that ends up.
This, in so many ways. I'd be considered a Microsoft schill, and even I don't like that idea. Microsoft needs companies like Apple, Google, and JetBrains to keep them from getting complacent.
If you would prefer "native UI", then you would hate Visual Studio as well. Visual Studio 6 (1998) was the last one which used Win32 API for the UI. Visual Studio.net (aka 2002) already had this non-standard UI controls. Even Eclipse is more "native UI" than Visual Studio, as Eclipse UI is rendered by Win32API and uses common controls. VS uses WPF and they switched to an non-native-look skin starting with Visual Studio 2013.
Btw. even Office uses non-native UI controls since the very beginning of Office programs around 1990. You can see this if you open Word 6 in Win95 (or later), the controls and even child-window theme looks like Win3.1. Office 97 had a very visible non-standard window theme with the application title in italic font (no other Win95 app looks like that). The menu bar of Office 1997 and later looks non-standard as well. Office 2007 and later draw a custom drawn ribbon area over the Win32 menu. With COM you can integrate a Word/Excel/etc document area in your sample Win32 application and you can watch how the traditional nativ menu bar is overdrawn by a ribbon area if you click inside the document area.
Last time I installed a trial version of VS, it had these weird all-caps menu bars and some kind of metro-ish, flat UI. Compared to that, Swing looked more native…
(What is it with MS changing the UI with every OS/Office release? Worse than even OS X, and barely better than the plethora of Linux look-and-feels. And yes, I did object to flat tool bar buttons back in the day, too.)
Xamarin Studio is already, essentially, open source. It's called "MonoDevelop". Xamarin Studio is just a "skin" of MonoDevelop, because it just bundles 4 plugins that MD doesn't have: Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Mac, and Xamarin-Branding. If the SDKs are going to be opensourced, for sure this distinction between XamarinStudio and MonoDevelop will not hold anymore?
Those plugins won't be open sourced. We're releasing the Xamarin runtime and all the commandline tools you need to build apps, but we're going to keep some of the IDE stuff proprietary.
I was really hoping I would be able to develop on Linux. Visual Studio is nice (my favorite IDE actually), but I'm willing to put up with lesser IDEs if it means I don't have to use Windows.
>but I'm willing to put up with lesser IDEs if it means I don't have to use Windows.
Check out the recent news - Microsoft is making Windows a lot more attractive to developers even those with Linux background.
I spent the last ~12 months doing C++ with Clang on Linux and porting that to windows was a lot less painful than I though it would be, even Visual C++ required maybe a day of work to get working - the biggest issue being Nuget and their Angle Packages are only available for sandboxed Windows apps - it took two hours to configure projects and fix stuff that made VC++ choke. This was a template using C++14 project btw. so I'm impressed.
And they now support using Clang as a front-end to VS code generator backend - no MinGW or Cygwin. Sadly the compiler crashed when I tried that and I still haven't gotten around to sending them the bug with repro - need to try with Update 2 first.
And on top of all this they just announced they will implement linux kernel interfaces in windows and add support for running ELF binaries - and they will port apt-get with cannonical - basically you can get Ubuntu packages to run natively on windows kernel - without recompiling or nothing.
Tacking on some of the good stuff from Linux doesn't make Windows any less of a horrible option for many, if not most, of us.
I am impressed by what Microsoft is doing, and I'm willing to use Azure and other MS tech at some point, but only if I can get away with not having to deal with Windows for anything but a small build slave server for Windows Phone and Windows builds, just like I currently do with a Mac Mini.
On top of that I will add "It's propietary". Because it is. It's a security risk, it means I have to buy it and I have to manage every license I buy. No need for the Stallman pasta here to express clear reasons why it is unacceptable for me and many others.
Other reasons:
- Bloated by default. Comes with many things I do not need, and some I outright despise.
- Resource hungry. It's gotten much, much better with the last few versions, but I can take my Linux set-up to a lowly Chromebook, a discardable netbook or a cheap SoC like the RPi and barely notice a difference for most of what I do. I cannot do that with Windows.
- Not POSIX. I could switch to OS X or BSD tomorrow and barely notice the difference for most of my computing. Not on Windows.
- Carries a particular culture of everything having to be done on the GUI. And what a bad GUI it is.
- Security wise it's terrible, you can't simply brush off the threat of malware as I do on Linux.
- No first class package management. The App Store is a joke.
- It is a completely different system from what I run or would run on my servers anyway.
I could go on but I think it's enough to justify why Windows is not a good option for me (me, as in, me, not someone who's really happy now with Windows).
IMHO every GUI (Win, Mac, Gnome, KDE etc.) is bad compared to any decent CLI, if you are trying to complete non-trivial tasks. The real problem is, on Windows you don't have a simple way to switch from doing things in the GUI to doing them on command line. You can, but it's sort of second-class citizen.
> you can't simply brush off the threat of malware as I do on Linux
Uhm, as a former Linux-only user (for about 2 years, circa 2011-2012) I would advise you not to brush it off completely.
No but TBH I didn't with Windows 8/8.1/10 either. In either case, you should be aware that malware exists for any platform (Linux too) and always apply the right level of caution.
To be honest my last malware experience on Windows date from years ago, when I was still naive and clicking on popups in a browser. Haven't seen a malware in a long time, if we don't count as malware the nuisances like the Java installer, Java updater, flash updater, iTunes updater, Adobe updater, all of which either install malware or open popups regularly to nag me to update or install things.
"It's proprietary" is a fully legitimate pain point. It means that I can never fully trust that part of my toolbox, what if it has a bug that gets neglected by the developer or it gets abandoned. The open source ideology is not attractive just because of its ethics.
Why is this being discussed like Ubuntu is the only Linux edition available? You seriously think CentOS, Arch or *BSD users will jump ship because of this?
No, but people wanting a stable no-fuss desktop with everything (from laptop sleep to device drivers) working, access to proprietary software and all kinds of 3rd party drivers available, will.
I use OS X mostly because of the UNIX underpinnings. I could not care less for Linux of the desktop, despite having used it since 1997 (and having a history with UNIX going back to Sun OS and HP-UX).
If Windows gets good enough with its basic unix userland support, and has a decent shell, I'll be very tempted to try it.
After all, any actual deployment etc, I do on Linux servers and VMs (vagrant etc) -- no reason to pollute one's base desktop system with development libs and setups.
> No, but people wanting a stable no-fuss desktop with everything (from laptop sleep to device drivers) working, access to proprietary software and all kinds of 3rd party drivers available, will.
Have you used a recent Linux distro? They are mainly stable and no fuss, and they don't require you to run proprietary software.
>and they don't require you to run proprietary software.
Only I specifically asked the inverse: to be able to run all the proprietary software I want.
Besides, that's always the case -- "a recent Linux distro" is always supposed to fix all of these problems, I've been hearing that (and trying in vain) ever since 2000 or so. And I use Linux on the server side just fine (and actually have several desktop Linux installations too, since 1997 and RedHat 5.3 IIRC, just not as my basic everyday work/fun desktop, because they're dreadful still).
I must say it is quite delusional to argue that I wrote that the "Linux desktop is still in the same state as it was in 1997".
I never wrote that, and it is indeed much improved.
What I wrote is another thing: that the total parity with proprietary desktop OSes (Windows, OS X) "just works-iness" is always "in another distro" or "a release away".
And there's another problem: proprietary desktop OSs haven't stood still in their 1997 state either. They are a moving target.
Perhaps not, but that was the core of your argument, wasnt it? That Linux is still in the sorry state it was back then, in the way that still, in 2016 Linux is behind the proprietary OSes?
Sorry to break it to you, but this is simply false.
In fact Linux offers far superior hardware support to OS X or Windows. Also the actual "desktop software" provided on Linux is far superior (WMs and such).
>Which doesn't mean much -- or even it's a plus for some.
It does mean a lot, you just don't accept that it does. And yes, some people are masochists. That's their decision, but we should reward people who force people to be masochists.
>>And Microsoft spies on its users.
>Well, we're spied on any network use we do anyway.
Privacy isn't binary. Just because it's possible to penetrate walls with xrays doesn't suddenly mean that you don't close the curtains in your house when you're naked.
If Microsoft develops cross-platform IDE's and office tools I would happily use their software on Linux. Windows is a bit bloated for me, I've reinstalled Windows 10 and 8 a couple of times and upon fresh install it winds up using half of my available RAM, while on Linux running the same amount of software I use less than 1 GB of ram. I don't think I'll ever go back unless they made it less resource hungry. "Windows Lite" would be cool to see if anything.
How much of that "half your RAM" was actually taken up by windows caching? Windows caches pretty heavily these days, so will show a lot of memory used but will give that RAM up when needed. It also will swap out a lot of stuff that's unneeded, so bloat in my experience has been pretty minimal, and that's with some rather hungry programs running.
I don't run a PC with low ram nowdays and I've had the exact opposite problem - about 6 months ago after a random Fedora update I started noticing my system would start swapping after using it for a long time (6+ hours). I tried to diagnose memory usage but every tool I used didn't sum up used memory to the memory used by programs - and it wasn't reserved vs used or whatever - the system was visibly swapping on a machine with 8 GB ram and ~4GB memory used by running processes. I would just restart the machine after 8 hours but I've never had such issues with Windows (at least past XP, Win9x was basically restart after everything).
I have also found that desktop Linux has stopped being a reasonable solution to "bloat". I don't concern myself too much with bloat, as my machines are all pretty big (8GB laptop, 16GB desktop), but even with 8GB I can occasional get myself into a swapping situation. Firefox (I use the multiprocess developer version) and Thunderbird are memory hogs with an impressive appetite, so if I also start up a large-ish editor (like Atom or VSCode) and Inkscape or a video editor, I can end up with real memory problems.
I haven't actually dug in to see where all the memory is going precisely, but my email/web workflow (Firefox+Thunderbird) has been the same for about ten years now, so it's interesting that it continues to bump up against memory limits no matter how much memory I have. But, Windows on the same system has similar memory issues when working on the same tasks; so it is not immune, but I don't think it is notably worse than Linux.
Turn off swap and clear your caches to see your true ram usage:
swapoff -a -v
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
I recommend `htop` to check out your memory usage after that.
You can also tweak the vm.swapiness variable to change Linux's behavior there. I personally just turn swap off on all my systems as soon as I set them up.
I imagine the OOM killer would take out a process. In that case, I would suggest paying for some more ram before turning off swap. Swap is death for performance! :)
I desperately hope you know how the Windows memory manager works before you say it "uses half your RAM". Windows is very aggressive about caching and (especially) precaching-- if you're not using a memory readout tool that's been updated since Windows Vista changed things around, it's probably misleading you into thinking Windows' precache is actual "in-use" memory. It's not.
(If you're looking at Microsoft's Task Manager, make sure you're seeing the amount of memory in "available", that's what counts. "Free" is kind of a useless measure in Vista+.)
Aggregation does not necessarily imply improvement.
Architecturally, it's quite worse than just putting lipstick on a pig - they're bolting a racehorse on top of their pig.
If you look at things just right and ignore the pig, you can pretend you're galloping around on an able horse. but, inevitably, both you and the horse will have to deal with the fact that there's a pig bolted to the undercarriage.
Linux doesn't need to be put inside another OS to be any more relevant or useful.
I think, if it could talk, Linux would tell Windows: "Sit down - I got this."
However, the Roslyn language services are open source, which is what currently powers the C#/VB IDE services in Visual Studio and Omnisharp (optionally).
