Ballmer was not my favourite person to run MS, but that was a pretty good time to be a Windows developer if you bought in. Early Nadella days too. Now? It's too easy to find no MS answers for almost everything, even triple-A gaming is not the windows anchor it's been since they ran that doom demo
> but that was a pretty good time to be a Windows developer if you bought in
I did, it was great. Very apple-esque in a way. As long as you stayed in Microsoft's garden, you had a good time. Microsoft had, at the time, one of if not the most productive stack to build GUI desktop line of business apps. If your whole org was Microsoft from top to bottom, even better. AD auth in your desktop app in a couple of lines.
It was an expensive stack for sure, but I'd argue there's still nothing that has come close to it if you want to build an enterprise desktop app.
