Cross-Platform Microsoft 348
willdavid sends us to the ZDNet blogs for a provocative opinion piece by John Carroll. He points to Microsoft's evident cross-platform strategy with Silverlight, and wonders whether the company couldn't make money — and win friends — by extending its excellent development ecosystem cross-platorm. "Microsoft, apparently, is helping the folks at Mono to port Silverlight to Linux. This is good news, as the primary fear I've heard from developers is that Silverlight will be locked to Microsoft platforms and products. Microsoft has already committed to supporting Silverlight cross-browser on Windows, and has a version that runs on Mac OS X (which is even available from the Apple web site). The last step is Linux, and Microsoft is working with Novell and Mono to make this happen."
The last step is Linux? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:The last step is Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
They didn't cut and paste from Linux, they took it from BSD [wikipedia.org], and in the open. The BSD license "Regents of the University of California" attribution was in their copyright for a long time, though they did rewrite it (I think) for Vista.
Directions from Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
2. type make
3. ???
4. profit!
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bleh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:bleh (Score:5, Funny)
Well they've always done a good job at their Macintosh ports and keeping them up to date...
Oh, hold on a second while I minimize this window of IE5 for OSX. I have to open Outlook for OS9 to reply to an e-mail.
Re:bleh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:bleh (Score:5, Insightful)
Read your history books folks, it's all in Microsoft's history. Who needs a crystal ball?
LoB
Re:bleh (Score:5, Funny)
Killing off Flash and AJAX? So, you're saying we should LIKE Microsoft now?
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Didn't Microsoft pretty much invent all this AJAX stuff? (Wikipedia [wikipedia.org])
Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:bleh (Score:4, Interesting)
I've heard people say very good things about Word for Mac, and quite good things about Excel for Mac, but Access for Mac has never existed, making it unsuitable for a lot of corporate use where Access is horrendously abused as a cheap RAD tool for in-house applications.
Internet Explorer was released for Mac and UNIX when Netscape had a decent market share, but when it died they stagnated and died.
Microsoft embraced Java, and produced the fastest JVM on the block for a while. It's just a shame that i was subtly incompatible, so code that was written to run on it wouldn't run elsewhere.
The RTF specification was pushed by Microsoft when Word was a newcomer, to produce a standard format for interchange between word processors. It was latter extended to a huge (and undocumented) degree, making Word about the only thing that had a chance at correctly displaying Word RTF files (see also HTML).
Of course, with Silverlight they might really mean what they say about cross-platform support. Personally, I'll believe it when the Symbian version reaches feature-parity with the Wince version.
Silverlight spec (Score:2)
I thought so.
How about a counter example? (Score:2)
So the real question is.. (Score:2)
and when does step three kick in?
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Correct me if I'm wrong (as I'm sure others here have looked into this deal much more than I have), but doesn't that clause only relate to the "we won't sue you for any patents of ours which may be in Linux" piece. There is a much broader IP sharing, interoperability, and cooperation on projects which I don't believe has anything to do with that "Novell and thier clients" business.
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I think this is the "let's make use of free labor" step. The Mono guys, assuming they're happy not getting paid, would be smart to ensure that Microsoft grants them full immunity from any legal claims as a result of their development. Otherwise, if they decide to pull out they can simply say "Silverlight on Mono violates a number of our patents, sorry we forgot to tell you".
Novell develops Mono and if you recall they signed a patent deal that so many people got pissed about that protects Mono and Moonlig
Extinguish (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, Flash is a cross-platform delivery system for highly interactive content. (READ: unstable piece of shit that is not a real standard.) It's very popular for media players (Youtube), ads, and cheezy games. It basically made ActiveX irrelevent, and Microsoft is still a little peeved.
So, by helping the Mono folks make Silverlight available cross-platform, they get to look like the good guys, as well as give Adobe a full-frontal assault on Flash.
Right now, we are in the "embrace" stage.
Once Silverlight takes off and displaces Flash as the delivery system of choice for shitty-assed content, Microsoft will be free to extend Silverlight in any way they desire, without passing those changes on to the Mac or to Mono. So, they get to extinguish Java and Flash, and then once Silverlight is the only delivery system on the internet, they get to displace the web, as well.
This is just like their bid with ActiveX. The main difference is, they learned their lesson the first time. Don't make it MS-Windows-only until *after* it is perceived as the only system available.
Yes, this is paranoid ranting. But after you've been kicked in the balls four or five times by someone, you get a little antsy around them.
I don't think it's so paranoid... (Score:4, Interesting)
I work for a web services development company that relies heavily of most all of the targeted technologies (AJAX, server side scripting, Flash, etc). Just yesterday this very subject came up as we look at our business strategy over the next few years and what technologies we will need to adapt.
From what I've seen Silverlight is very much like Flash functionally. In fact (and please feel free to correct me) aside from being a WMV wrapper and there-by providing their own DRM system natively I see very little difference. From a developer stand-point it could be interesting. The multi-language support could speed development up in many cases and help create more interactive content as developers get to use tools they are familiar with to achieve the kinds of things they'd like to.
That said Adobe has been in this game for a long time now. Companies don't usually last that long being stupid so I'll be very interested to see if and how they respond to this. They absolutely *have* to see that this is a threat to one of their business models. And frankly I think Microsoft has done some things here that Adobe should have done already. Microsoft *will* get penetration enough to make a serious go if it simply based on their recent acquisition.
Gloves are off. Personally I'd like to see Adobe pull this off, but they are going to have to react quickly and I haven't heard a lot of buzz coming out of their corner. Time will tell. Silverlight is still in Alpha and while the demo's are interesting, I'd stop short of calling them revolutionary. I think it really will come down to developers on this one.
Not Adobe... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, if you want to get technical, Macromedia has been in this game for a long time now. Adobe's fairly new at it, unless you count their (relative) success pushing PDF as a de facto standard. Adobe does not have a perfect track record for developing great software, so I'd say the jury is still out as to how Flash will fare
What the ...? (Score:4, Insightful)
If Microsoft wants to port something to Linux, that's their option. They have the people and they can download all of the source code.
And they can license their product any way they want to.
The only problems arise when Linux developers (as opposed to Microsoft developers porting something to Linux) have access to Microsoft "Intellectual Property" and may become "tainted" by it.
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Yeah, that's definitely a danger of dancing with the bear. For now, I'll assume that the crossplatform love-in at MS is the real deal. If that is so, then there must be some business advantage to MS to do this now.
Exactly: (Score:2)
The key point to remember here is that Microsoft acting friendly towards Linux is not the same thing as Microsoft acting friendly towards Free Software. If this Silverlight stuff -- even the Mono implmentation -- is actually open enough that it could have been released under the GPLv3 without somebody getting sued, I'll eat my hat!
Looks like the MS fanbois got mod points. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ballmer talks about how the GPL is a "cancer". Yet you hang out on
That doesn't change the facts.
Microsoft can put Microsoft coders to work releasing Microsoft products on Linux.
Microsoft can license those products under whatever license Microsoft wants.
And no one could complain.
But when Microsoft talks about "working with" non-Microsoft coders to get Microsoft products on Linux, there's too much of a risk of Microsoft's "Intellectual Property" being "improperly" incorporated into such projects.
Everyone who isn't a Microsoft fanboi needs to ask themselves WHY Microsoft wouldn't handle such project itself, with its own people, if it saw the need for such on Linux.
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Besides, when you think of it in terms of dollars, it makes far more sense to use the mono team (which is on Novell's payroll), instead of paying for a team in-house.
What "expertise"? (Score:2)
Really?
So Microsoft doesn't have a Linux Lab?
So Microsoft hasn't already dug through the source code to find what patents Linux is "violating"?
Seems a bit contradictory to me.
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Secondly, then whole idea behind OSS from a corporation's perspective is to get OSS devs to do the work for free. If IBM can do this, so can MS.
yuck (Score:2)
One word... ActiveX (Score:2)
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Re:One word... ActiveX (Score:5, Insightful)
ActiveX is dead. Microsoft doesn't do anything with it, and there certainly isn't an interoperability push for
DirectX is simply "the Windows graphics API". Microsoft has stopped trying to make it more than that. Once upon a time, they wanted to go up against OpenGL, but when they realized they'd have to play nice on other platforms and give up some "superiority" in the gaming market (read: the only thing people "need" Windows for), they dropped the idea and moved on.
Silverlight is a subset of
I don't think Microsoft can get away with the same shenanigans they pulled in times past.
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DirectX is high performance graphics, sound, input (keyboard/mouse/joystic), and I think a couple other things API for Windows. The main Windows graphi
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What I meant was "DirectX is simply the Windows 3D graphics API" as opposed to it being a real cross-platform replacement for OpenGL.
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Silverlight like Flash is useful for things like video "YouTube" and "rich" interfaces. It is also regularly abused for ads, and other such total BS.
SVG "Pretty much killed by Adobe" and the Ogg Theora tag would be my ideal replacements for Both Flash and Silverlight. The Open Source community have been too slow in developing them so Microsoft has this opportunity. We shoul
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Notice that where FOSS was to market early, Apache, PHP, and Perl, or where they produced a replacement for a hyper expensive product Linux, Postgres and MySql FOSS does well.
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Huh? I made my living as a web developer using MS as a platform. So did everyone at my former employer (who is being bought out). I don't think you know the true market, because we never had any problem finding clients.
Quick! (Score:2)
Seriously, if they actually make good on this and continue to support the Mono version, more power to them.
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Seriously, if they actually make good on this and continue to support the Mono version, more power to them.
You should have used
Microsoft's future (Score:2)
It seems to me that Microsoft has to eventually modernize, and the easiest wa
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I agree with the basic premise, except for the Linux part. Apple has clearly taken the lead in this. The open path for migration for a proprietery OS vendor is through the BSD licensing. It allows for you to close whatever portion of your code changes you see fit. This is why Apple chose the Mach kernel for the base of OS/X. Converting to a standard UNIX-based operating system wil
How cross-platform are we talking here? (Score:4, Informative)
How exactly is Microsoft going to be supporting these cross-platform apps? Maybe they're thinking about doing what they did with IE on Macintosh, produce a version for other platforms, then stop distributing or providing updates to it once they decide it's no longer convenient.
Business applications are kind of strange beasts in the software world because of the long usage life they're expected to see. That's one of the reasons companies often want some big name company behind a product because they're afraid somewhere down the road the company might fold and they'd be left without support for a vital application. The problem is most of these companies haven't yet realized that open source applications provide much better guarantee because even if the original developers quit working on the application, it's always possible for someone else to take up the reins. In a proprietary system, even with a big developer behind it, there is nothing insuring that development continues on any given application.
Of course, in this case it sounds like maybe Microsoft is doing the right thing and actually helping the Mono guys make their product compatible with Microsoft's, but I'll still be wary of anything Microsoft is distributing directly.
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Considering that, it's strange that people keep going with Microsoft, which isn't exactly folding, but has been known to pull the rug from under people's feet once in
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Well, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any OS that didn't break a few things version to version, but 2000 to XP was minimal (mostl
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Sorry for the tangent. But you know, that's actually a really good argument against software subscription services where you access the software over the net. For instance, say your company relies on a certain CAD product. If you're using the desktop version and the vendor folds, you can still keep working while you look for a replacement. But if you're on the online version, you're stuck.
Bad news... (Score:2)
As for locking people into
this might be good. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Indeed, just like I said originally ("the business guys make the high level decisions").
Negative. Microsoft is a publicly traded and owned company. Their one and only goal is to make
Jumping the gun a little, aren't we? (Score:2)
We haven't even established that this product is mediocre yet, let alone 'excellent'. Lets see if its even worth side-tracking the resources of a lot of developers before we drink this particular Kool-Aide.
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Interesting To See (Score:2)
eh? (Score:2)
Didn't learn anything at all from the elementary school story about the fox/crow/rabbit and the hungry, hungry alligator, eh?
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If that's one of the O'Reilly books, then I think it's probably too advanced for kids in grade school.
Seriously, fox, crow and rabbit?
But MS will still control its development., right? (Score:2)
Anyone remember how IE and Microsoft Office had similar stories on Windows and the Mac? Tell me this will not happen again.
Won't happen (Score:2, Insightful)
Office and Windows are what is keeping Microsoft alive, and they know it.
Read [arstechnica.com], and read [com.com].
I'm not going to rag on the writer of TFA since he makes it clear he's presenting things from the perspective of a developer, but from the business side, no way. Ever.
their goal is to protect Windows, Flash Must Die (Score:5, Insightful)
So anything which grows that MS product will be good for protecting the Windows monopoly. If Flash is killed off, and in typical Microsoft fashion, MS Silverlight will become a Windows-only product. In 20 years of Microsoft history, there is absolutely NOTHING which shows any other path. A press release does not mean squat when it comes from Microsoft. Talk about doublespeak and truthiness.
And to even think that Microsoft wants to help enable Linux by the goodness of their heart is a fool. At Microsoft, it's all about 'Adobe must die, Linux must die. Long live Windows, long live Microsoft.' and only a complete newbie would/could think otherwise. IMO.
LoB
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You have to be joking, right? (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone really expect Microsoft to continue development of Silverlight for Mac and/or Linux after Silverlight has killed Flash? After Microsoft killed Internet Explorer for Mac and Windows Media Player for Mac (not that they even remotely considered maknig any of that available on Linux)? You trust them? You trust some guy who has been praising Microsoft exclusively to the detriment of all else for almost a decade?
You have to be joking, right?
Cross-platform (ideally) means platform-agnostic (Score:3, Insightful)
Tread cautiously, Penguins (Score:2)
Be verwy, verwy careful...
What if the customers became savvy? (Score:3, Interesting)
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In that case I imagine certain third party developers would suddenly find a very large cash infusion from Microsoft with certain strings attached. Of course, MS could also opt to simply clone the particular tool and bundle it with Silverlight once again putting the open version at a disadvantage (see IE/Outlook bundled with Windows).
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The good news is that we don't need Silverlight. We already have open specifications and open source i
Excellent Development Ecosystem? (Score:5, Informative)
Excellent development ecosystem? Don't make me laugh. I've been hearing about the asserted superiority of Microsoft's development tools and the wonderful enterprise features of their products for years, and always thought to myself "well, probably." However, I recently started working in a Microsoft shop and I can tell you first hand that the Microsoft "development ecosystem" is not excellent. It's not terrible, but it's not great, either. Certainly not worlds better than some already available environments (cross-platform or otherwise).
Without going into specifics, I can say that I spend more time struggling with Visual Studio than doing anything else. Most of the features I want are actually there, but it's not always obvious where to find them or how to use them. Some features are missing, or are nominally there, but fail to work in the situations where I need them. Then there is a load of baggage that just gets in the way. Erorr messages that it gives me are almost always uninformative, wrong, or both (my favorite so far is "'1' is null or not an object"). At first, I thought it was just me being inexperienced, but even colleagues with years of experience run into these same issues. And it's not like I'm very demanding; usually, I'm just trying to find out what the value of something is or how the program got to a certain point.
And that's just Visual Studio. We use a number of other Microsoft products in our workflow, and there are issues with most of them. For the most part, these are usability issues. They don't actually prevent you from getting work done, but they do slow you down. Stability issues come a distant second. One issue that hasn't affected me but is affecting the company as a whole is that a lot of time goes into making sure things work with the current _and_ previous versions of Microsoft products. Sometimes, this is as simple as just not using some new feature, but sometimes it takes up a lot of time.
Note that I have purposefully highlighted the bad parts and omitted the good ones. My point is not to give an objective impression of the Microsoft platform for development purposes, but to show that it falls short of excellence. I would never choose it myself, but I wouldn't say it's actually bad. Just not excellent.
Re:Excellent Development Ecosystem? (Score:4, Insightful)
TWW
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Another Standard and Mono is a Boat Anchor (Score:2)
And I've had to try to install Mono before (on Centos 4) and it was an involved process and then found out a dependency was broken (Centos's prob, low support, "oh well") and stopped there. Then I relized I didn't want to go through all that extra effort of crapifying my systems for one specific program, and located a just as capable light weight alternative that comes without all the cruf
Platform agnostic/independent? ... not very much (Score:2)
Opera is not supported in the current releases but will be supported with future builds,[11] as will be Windows 2000.[12] Additional platforms are being considered as well.[13]
I am writing this comment from my Opera browser in Linux... (imagine, two layers of incompatibility) while I am looking a flash video in youtube (and after failing to see the Silverlight "demo" video because it is in some obscure format WMV).
I could even write this comment using my Wii (and watch YouTube videos...)
Fighting the previous war? (Score:2)
Microsoft and Mono (Score:2)
Second, from Microsofts own web site http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/collusion.html [msn.com]
collusion
noun
Definition:
secret cooperation: secret cooperation between people in order to do something illegal or underhanded
I don't think Microsoft helping Novell is illegal, but it may be underhanded.
Is Novell helping Adobe make sure thier media.flashplayer.class/plugin runs just as well under
Does Microsoft lack the programming talent to create a cross-platform browser
MS locks developers into Win; MS extends too much (Score:3, Insightful)
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But I'm at least consistant, and I think you've got a strawman here. Has anyone on Slashdot complained about anything going cross-platform?
It's not that we don't want silverlight to be cross-platform. It's that we're looking at it from every possible angle, trying to figure out why MS would be giving us something like this, because every time they've appeared to give us something in the past, it eventually led to us being screwed over.
It's that we're afraid that Linu
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1) Microsoft isin't writing it, it's the Mono team, with guidance from MS
2) And they aren't really writing it for Linux, they're writing it for Mono, which is a cross-OS develpoment platform (like Java) that happens to run on Linux, as well as other OSes.
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Re:Excellent Development Ecosystem?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course if you choose to view the raw output via the "Output" view, then yes you will get that. Of course, I always find it much easier to choose the "Error List" view where you can just toggle to choose if you want to see errors and/or warnings and/or information messages. Then just click on each any item in that list to take me to the corresponding issue in code.
I think the above shows your level of "I've tried using visual studio tools", so I don't see the need to go further (in fact I didn't read any further)
Amen. (Score:2)
Apparently 5 minutes in the IDE is all GP needed to discover he didn't like it. I actually read the whole post and the entire thing was filled with things that were easily correctable, like what you pointed out.
When I first tried tabbed browsing, I honestly didn't like it. I first tried giving it a shot in Firefox and then in IE when IE7 came out.
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I think it's probably hard to design an IDE that appeals to everyone. Clearly VS appeals to some wide developer demographic, or else it wouldn't be the success that it is. But there will always be those who write and compile everything manually, and if they hop into an IDE at all, it's to use the debugger
Re:Excellent Development Ecosystem?? (Score:5, Interesting)
I see you haven't discovered the "Error List" window. View > Error List (Alt-V-I or Ctrl-/-E). It has 3 toolbar buttons at the top (checked-state type) one for errors, one for warnings, one for messages.
I asked them why they can't just write a shell script (or dos shell script, whatever the hell windows has) and they said that it would take too long to develop that. Idiots.
Idiots, indeed. Create a new installer project. Tell it to use the output of one or more of the other projects in your solution. (Solutions are multi-project binders, projects are apps, libraries, services, sites, etc.) You can even add wizards and (*shudder*) registry entries in addition to the regular file copying functions. You can specify new files/folders/shortcuts in the program files, start menu, or any other place in the filesystem. From nothing to a functional (but ugly) installer takes little more than 5 minutes. And it handles all the uninstall stuff (and install-new-version-in-place-of-the-old-one stuff) for you too (your program will appear in the Add/Remove Programs panel automatically).
Why, if the OS is called Windows, am I only allowed to have one of them in my development environment?
Again, you didn't actually learn to use the tool. Tools > Options (Alt-T-O) shows you the typically huge (and rightfully so) options pane of an IDE. It's no larger or more complex than Eclipse's, if you want to get into comparisons. But notably, the first option on the first pane of the first item listed in the tree-control on the left (Environment > General) is called "Window Layout". It has a set of two radio buttons. The first one is the default, labelled "Tabbed documents". The second one is labelled "Multiple Documents". I'm guessing you want the second one.
Can someone please describe what is so great about visual studio? I've heard other people say it, but I really don't see it. (Please compare and contrast to Eclipse and/or Xcode.)
Personally, I find the all-in-one IDE (Eclipse and VS) much more usable than the everything-spread-over-hell-and-creation IDE (Xcode).
VS has advantages in working with
Eclipse kicks VS's ass in supporting eleventy-thousand languages and has a slightly less developed template system, probably due to most of those languages' plugins being in perpetual beta. Code-assist is nearly non-existent in anything other than Java, and is mostly useless because of that. Help files are also non-existent.
Xcode is geared toward C and Objective-C. Ugh. Screw that crap. It complains if you try to use Java, and it seems to ignore your commands if you try to use C++. You aren't doing it The One True Way With The One True Programming Language (Obj-C), thus you aren't worthy of, well, anything. Get off its lawn. I'm not wild about Xcode, mostly for that reason. Apple includes PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby (?), and probably a half-dozen other nice little languages with their systems, but they don't get off their ass and add the necessary meta-code to make Xcode work properly for those languages.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that if Microsoft would give Windows up as a good try and focus on bringing
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Maybe the market shares are shifting, but I'm getting so many queries about Mac and Linux versions of software, that I just can't stick with just Windows anymore. I haven't explored Mono much yet, but I need something that's cross-platform and if C#/.NET/Visual Studio isn't giving m
Re:Excellent Development Ecosystem?? (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, when you hit compile, it generates and spews out a command line to a little text window. Which is fine, but it doesn't bother to actually parse that data and present it in a meaningful way. You end up scrolling through dozens of warnings (if you're not compiling with the equivilent of -ferror) to find relevant errors.
Huh? You're looking at the Output window, which shows the build output. Visual Studio does parse that into a list of errors and warnings, accessable from, the "Error List" window. You can turn off warnings in this window to just show the errors. Double clicking on the errors will take you to the correct source file and line that generated the error.
Oh, and then there's deployment. I worked for a while with some folks that had a C++ application that talked with the Microsoft SQL database and IIS. Their "push" procedure involved remote desktop to the server, clicking buttons to take down the server, pointing it at the maintenance site, creating a new directory in the file explorer, naming it correctly and copying the existing database files to it, copying over the newly compiled bits, testing it in situ and finally pointing the server back to the live site. This took them between 3 and 6 hours, every Friday night. I asked them why they can't just write a shell script (or dos shell script, whatever the hell windows has) and they said that it would take too long to develop that. Idiots.
Yes, they're idiots. We do all of this automatically through NAnt. I'm pretty sure you can do this all through the command line if you're masochistic (quite frankly, the Windows command line sucks hairy balls). But theres seriously no excuse not to have deployment automated, especially if its taking several hours.
But thats not what I'm here to rant at you about. I'm here to rant about Visual Studio. Why, if the OS is called Windows, am I only allowed to have one of them in my development environment? I never got the MDI thing, but I routinely, on Mac OS, have 20 source files open and visible. Why does Visual Studio insist on cramming them into one single pane?
Theres a setting in Visual Studio that lets you switch to a windowed environment. Tools->Options->Environment->General->Window Layout->Multiple Documents. It still constrains those source code windows to the area of the parent window (Visual Studio's window), but you can pane them and everything. If what you want is to be able to drag the source code windows outside of the main Visual Studio window, then you can't do that. I would agree that it would be much nicer if you could. I prefer the tab layout, personally.
Gargh, its frustrating. Why can't the compiler take normal command line switches with meaningful names?
I use MSBuild to compile our app, and it takes command line switches. I'm not sure what kind of switches you are looking for, however. You don't get things like specific optimization switches, since those are in the project settings, but I typically build one of a set of pre-defined modes (Release, Debug, etc).
Since we're talking about the "development ecosystem", why does the command.com shell so completely fail at being useful?
cmd sucks. Big time. It would be nice if they could actually start pushing powershell, but thats unlikely to happen anytime soon. They should have put it in Vista, at the very least. Hopefully their next server product has it.
The debugger is even worse, hiding and showing things based on what it *thinks* I want to see. The only benefit it has over gdb on the command line is mixed assembly/source view, but at least with gdb I can quickly disassemble whatever I need to, not just where the PC is.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any examples of the debugger hiding and showing me things. It pretty much shows me what I ask it to.
Can someone please desc
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Right click on the tab. Select "Floating".
Si
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*Sigh* Here we go. Its call the "Error List" window. By default its there, so I would go and reopen it the next time you compile. Code properly, and the warnings go away. If you can
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Let me start with the whole MDI/Tabbed interface thing: if you're using a Mac, I can see where you're coming from. However, when you have a "task bar" showing you all open windows (rather than all open applications as OSX does), it gets cluttered very quickly, as does the alt-tab selection. This is where it comes in particularly handy.
Oh, and to bring you up speed with the Windows command line is sadly still sorely lacking in the flexibility of shell scripting, though Windows PowerShell [wikipedia.org] is a vast improv
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The main complaints I have with Visual Studio is it's bloated and the debug inspector has a horrible interface. A bunch of narrow boxes that you have to hover over with your mouse. If I could set breakpoints as currently done and have inspection done like gdb, I'd be happy.
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For one (Score:3, Informative)
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If I was shown that Mono is a solid platform to work on, stable, fully functional, I'd be all for ditching php and using something I consider superior (which I consider