50 Years of Microsoft and Developer Tools with Scott Guthrie

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How 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.

In this episode, we cover:

• Microsoft’s early years building developer tools 

• Why Visual Basic faced resistance from devs back in the day: even though it simplified development at the time

• How .NET helped bring a new generation of server-side developers into Microsoft’s ecosystem

• Why Windows Phone didn’t succeed 

• The 90s Microsoft dev stack: docs, debuggers, and more

• How Microsoft Azure went from being the #7 cloud provider to the #2 spot today

• Why Microsoft created VS Code

• How VS Code and open source led to the acquisition of GitHub

• What Scott’s excited about in the future of developer tools and AI

• And much more!

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Timestamps

(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

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

• Microsoft is dogfooding AI dev tools’ future

• Microsoft’s developer tools roots

• Why are Cloud Development Environments spiking in popularity, now?

• Engineering career paths at Big Tech and scaleups

• How Linux is built with Greg Kroah-Hartman

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See the transcript and other references from the episode at ⁠⁠https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast⁠⁠

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