Following on from the recent and surprising (to me) news that Microsoft Visual Studio is only just about to become a 64-bit application, this analysis <https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/20/what_next_for_visual_studio/> sums up the increasing difficulty of continuing to develop Microsoft’s flagship IDE, as the market continues to move away from a Windows-centric one: Modern development is dominated by web and mobile clients and Windows is increasingly isolated as the only common platform that is not Unix-like. This can cause friction with things like line endings, filemode settings, Bash scripts ... Basically, traditional (now “legacy”) Windows-centric technologies are being inexorably left behind as Microsoft rushes to embrace the latest trends. Two examples mentioned in the article are Azure DevOps (the current incarnation of Team Foundation Server, the old corporate-level, inflexible and unfriendly version-control system that Microsoft was pushing before Git became popular) and Visual Studio Tools For Office, the framework for developing third-party addons to Microsoft Office, now being left behind in favour of web-based technologies: "My company relies on VSTO to deliver our product, and while I understand that OfficeJS is the future, we need to be able to maintain our current product for the next several years while an OfficeJS-based successor is developed. Additionally, VSTO offers capabilities that OfficeJS simply does not... I would also note that VSTO has received essentially no updates since 2010," said developer Eric Smith. This is what happens when you hitch your wagon to a proprietary star: even a big, powerful and important star can still leave you in the lurch.