I studied at Utrecht University and all the programming classes in the Bachelor were C#, Visual Studio, XNA, DirectX. Windows. Database class i had to learn in Proprietary Microsoft tools too. All Microsoft stuff. Sure nobody would complain if you did stuff on Linux but all the support by TAs and teachers was on Microsoft platforms only.. The Master was much better but the Bachelor basically was grooming people to become Microsoft consultants.

If the rot starts at the core of your education curriculum there is no saving your dependence on Microsoft.

I always found this choice puzzling to teach people proprietary technologies in a public institution. This was before DotNet core and VSCode was a thing and Microsoft hadnt whitewashed themselves to look like an open source friendly brand yet.

And same goes for less technical disciplines too. Adobe, Autodesk, Archicad, etc. It's pretty bad software: expensive, very buggy, poor extensibility, poorly maintained, closed-source, rapid tech debt accumulation requires upgrading your pc every few years. If only a minor percentage of organizations licensing it would instead spend that budget financing an open source project, that would have a very positive effect for everyone. I can somewhat understand private businesses not thinking long-term, but public institutions paying licensing fees instead of financing open-source seems like plain incompetence. Then again, maybe there's a lack of open-source initiatives willing to spearhead this.

Surely not _all_ the courses... Utrecht was and is big on Haskell as you know... Given that you TA'd a course on it :)

I've gone without Microsoft products for many years now. It's SOOOOO much better.

I had a similar experience at a different university in NL, practically the entire curriculum was Oracle & Cisco.