Not all devs. Microsoft tools have contributed to a long, successful, and enjoyable career for me, and I have yet to find an IDE as nice as VS (any contemporary version). The MS toolsets have been mostly good to work with, a few warts not withstanding.
What OSS tools and IDEs are making your devs so happy, and making their jobs better than say, VS 2012? (serious question)
• The biggest smile was moving them from VSS to GIT (+GHE)
• Replacing Windows servers with Redhat has opened up a wealth of automation opportunities
• RoR on the frontend has allowed a much faster development and deployment pipeline (ASP.NET and Java are still used for the high-ceremony stuff)
• Our monitoring and alerting is much more straightforward and comprehensive for the OSS components
• I am so tired of propping up sickly MS servers, the Redhat servers are rock solid straight out the gate
OTOH for large enterprise, Sharepoint and Office integration works very well, that's really the MS sweetspot. I'm also interested in their new ALM offering (TFS), I haven't seen an OSS equivalent as yet. However these are not dev stacks.
I'm not saying you can't do great stuff using MS tech - stackoverflow is proof of that. But I have extensive experience in both worlds, and I'll take OSS any day.
"What OSS tools and IDEs are making your devs so happy, and making their jobs better than say, VS 2012?"
You will believe that I am joking, but Vim, bash, git, grep, gdb, valgrind, llvm and lots of UNIX tools. We use IDA Pro a lot too.
Most of the people that work with me learned with Microsoft tools, myself included but we can't stand it anymore. Why? They are so powerless and limited, specially in the extension mechanism: extending it using your own tools, which basically do 90% of our work.
The main reason for that is that commercial companies can't let you do what you want, they can't let you do what you need like reading the system internals like with linux system utilities(Windows or Apple monopolizes access to it making amazing tools like Numega SoftIce dead) and even reading the source code.
We use VS 2012 and Xcode for compiling Windows and Mac versions of our software, that is mainly designed and tested in pure Unix.
Sure. And we shouldn't forget that Microsoft was primarily a development tools manufacturer for a long time. They have a long track record in such tools.
> What OSS tools and IDEs are making your devs so happy, and making their jobs better than say, VS 2012?
It depends to a large extent on what people are doing. To be honest, I have become so happy with VIM, BASH, base UNIX utilities, and such that I don't think I am ever likely to achieve the same productivity in an IDE. The thing is that IDE's are a fundamentally different paradigm and they make easy things a bit easier, but I think a text processing paradigm is better for the hard problems.
Not all devs. Microsoft tools have contributed to a long, successful, and enjoyable career for me, and I have yet to find an IDE as nice as VS (any contemporary version). The MS toolsets have been mostly good to work with, a few warts not withstanding.
What OSS tools and IDEs are making your devs so happy, and making their jobs better than say, VS 2012? (serious question)