50 Years of Microsoft and Developer Tools with Scott Guthrie
50 Years of Microsoft and Developer Tools with Scott GuthrieScott Guthrie, a 28-year Microsoft veteran shares the inside story of how the company evolved its developer tools—from Visual Basic to Azure, VS Code, and GitHub—and what’s next with AI.
Stream the Latest EpisodeListen and watch now on YouTube, Spotify and Apple. See the episode transcript at the top of this page, and timestamps for the episode at the bottom. Brought to You By
— In This EpisodeHow has Microsoft changed since its founding in 1975, especially in how it builds tools for developers? In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI at Microsoft. Scott has been with the company for 28 years. He built the first prototype of ASP.NET, led the Windows Phone team, led up Azure, and helped shape many of Microsoft’s most important developer platforms. We talk about Microsoft’s journey from building early dev tools to becoming a top cloud provider—and how it actively worked to win back and grow its developer base. We cover:
 TakeawaysSome of the most interesting topics discussed were these: Microsoft started as a dev tools company, and the company still has dev tools in its DNA. The first product Microsoft released was a BASIC interpreter in 1975. Over the decades, the company kept building not just platforms (Windows, Azure) or applications (Office, Teams) but developer tools (languages like Visual Basic, C#, TypeScript, and tools like Visual Studio or VS Code.) I have the feeling that out of all of Big Tech, Microsoft still “gets” developers the most. Looking back at the history of the company helps to understand why this is. There are some parallels between the reaction to Visual Basic in the 90s and the reaction to AI today. When Visual Basic was released in the 1990s, experienced developers at the time questioned whether it would be a bad thing that now “everyone can be a developer,” and VB could reduce the need for professional developers. Looking back, VB did expand the pool of developers, but it did not reduce the demand for devs working with other languages. Today, there are some parallels on how AI (yet again!) makes it easier for “anyone to write programs.” Still, I cannot unsee the parallels with VB: technically, anyone can create programs both with Visual Basic and with AI: but to create complex programs, it still takes a lot of effort. And experienced engineers could well be needed to turn VB or AI prototypes into production-ready software. Dev tools greatly helped Windows succeed back in the day. How did Windows become as popular as it did in the 90s and 2000s? One part of this success seems to have been Microsoft building tools for developers to build programs running on Windows: tools like Microsoft C, Quick C, Visual Studio and frameworks like ATL (Active Template Library) and MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes). Microsoft’s philosophy when creating Windows was “build great tools, so devs can make great applications.” Windows Phone’s failure served as a good lesson to Microsoft and to Scott. I first met Scott shortly before the Windows Phone launch in 2010, when Scott was heading up the Windows Phone team. Windows Phone had a standout developer experience at the time – far better than what Xcode or Android Studio offered at the time – and features like Live Tiles that were ahead of iPhone and Android platform capabilities back then. Still, Windows Phone struggled to gain a large enough market share, and it was discontinued a few years later. Scott shared that the biggest learnings from Windows Phone were:
Interesting quote from the episode: the genius behind TypeScriptScott Guthrie (from 22:26):
The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episodeTimestamps(00:00) Intro (02:25) Microsoft’s early years building developer tools (06:15) How Microsoft’s developer tools helped Windows succeed (08:00) Microsoft’s first tools were built to allow less technically savvy people to build things (11:00) A case for embracing the technology that’s coming (14:11) Why Microsoft built Visual Studio and .NET (19:54) Steve Ballmer’s speech about .NET (22:04) The origins of C# and Anders Hejlsberg’s impact on Microsoft (25:29) The 90’s Microsoft stack, including documentation, debuggers, and more (30:17) How productivity has changed over the past 10 years (32:50) Why Gergely was a fan of Windows Phone—and Scott’s thoughts on why it didn’t last (36:43) Lessons from working on (and fixing) Azure under Satya Nadella (42:50) Codeplex and the acquisition of GitHub (48:52) 2014: Three bold projects to win the hearts of developers (55:40) What Scott’s excited about in new developer tools and cloud computing (59:50) Why Scott thinks AI will enhance productivity but create more engineering jobs ReferencesWhere to find Scott Guthrie: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guthriescott/ Mentions during the episode: • ASP.NET Core: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet • Altair BASIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC • Paul Allen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen • Bill Gates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates/ • QuickBASIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickBASIC • Microsoft C: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/microsoft-c.29635/ • QuickC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickC • Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/ • OpenAI: https://openai.com/ • Visual Basic: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/getting-started/ • Microsoft Access: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access • Microsoft FrontPage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage • Visual FoxPro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro • C++: https://cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/ • MFC Libraries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Foundation_Class_Library • Steve Ballmer at the NET Conference going crazy about Developers! | 1999:  • Anders Hejlsberg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahejlsberg/ • TypeScript: https://www.typescriptlang.org/ • Borland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland • Turbo Pascal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal • Microsoft Copilot: https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/acu8hmXiWcxpRwCvZYuwC • Windows Phone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone • CodePlex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodePlex • GitHub: https://github.com/ • Ajax Control Toolkit: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/web-forms/videos/ajax-control-toolkit/ • jQuery: https://jquery.com/ • Linux: https://www.linux.org/ • Atom: https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/sunsetting-atom/ • Sublime Text: https://www.sublimetext.com/ • Jetbrains: https://www.jetbrains.com/ • Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/ • Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/ • Microsoft is dogfooding AI dev tools’ future: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/microsoft-ai-dev-tools • Microsoft’s developer tools roots: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/microsofts-developer-tools-roots — Production and marketing by Pen Name. You’re on the free list for The Pragmatic Engineer. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. Many readers expense this newsletter within their company’s training/learning/development budget. If you have such a budget, here’s an email you could send to your manager. This post is public, so feel free to share and forward it. If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy my book, The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Here is what Tanya Reilly, senior principal engineer and author of The Staff Engineer's Path said about it:
|
%26stroke%3Dnone%26strokeWidth%3D3.6){kind=small}
Comments
Post a Comment