They said it in the Epic vs Apple litigation, something along the lines of "we create the entire App Store market", like the 3rd party developers aren't.

Microsoft developer tooling is usually pretty great IME. It's being a user that mostly sucks

Not only is dotnet development is the benchmark to aspire to (IMO), i'm not sure you could name another corporate project that comes even close. Is there a way to globally see github project activity by rank? All of dotnet is MIT. They literally have public meetings and take public notes. What other corporate project has this?

That is one part of microsoft, yeah, but then you also them making various parts of windows worse to try to squeeze every penny out of people, and where that fails, doing things like ads for apps in the start menu

The Swift ecosystem is pretty amazing too. I've made several PRs and got them merged into Swift Parser while exchanging ideas with Apple employees fruitfully. The only big caveat is there's no guarantee your work will ever be merged into Xcode, meaning most Swift users won't benefit from your work because of Apple's opaque gatekeeping.

Microsoft's developer relations are highly variable: they are great in some areas (C# and .NET Core continue to be fantastic, Visual Studio's debugger is second to none, going back to gdb after it is like banging rocks together to make fire), and awful in others (if I want to write a GUI application in Windows, what should I do to be on the idiomatic happy path? Microsoft: shrug, try one of these half-dozen half-baked frameworks. No we won't tell you which one, and that doesn't matter because it'll be deprecated in three years anyway).

This is better than the story from Apple and Google, who are just terrible consistently, but there is room for improvement.

On the repos and tools that have funding sure, or you can have them reject that they are maintaining things, put out a github repo, fail to review anything or merge anything but build it so its really hard to expand without them, and then close the product down in five years or less.

They are, however there are plenty of things to complain about, and you won't find any praise from developers that bought into WinRT reboot, and how it was managed since Windows 8, with tooling rebooted multiple times and left to rotten, me included.

It might be true on developer tools. For them I was talking more about Windows, Teams, etc

Oh I know and I absolutely hate it. I can't think of a good argument for these changes. They're just not worse than what has always prevented me from owning IOS devices