Original article is poorly titled. The DirectX Toolkit (a collection of DX utilities and wrappers) is on Github. That is nice. If the DirectX SDK was on Github, that would be major news.
Please change the title! ("Games for Windows (Live)" is not on GitHub)
It is rather confusing and simple wrong in this context. "Games for Windows" was a brand name and certification process. Also many older games like GTA IV (2009) came with a GfWL (Games for Windows Live) DRM client. As Microsoft discontinued that software many older PC games cannot be started anymore or at least the online cloud game-profile with save games is lost and the game cannot be played online/multiplayer (only a tiny fraction of games got a patch that removed GfWL by their developers). So an open source release of "Games for Windows Live" on GitHub would have saved many PC games!
I'm convinced it's because he wasn't a developer himself.
He chanted "developers" but never seemed to push for anything developers wanted.
The moment Silverlight was announced, I was waiting for Microsoft to take on a cross-platform apps strategy crossing desktops/laptops, phones and Xbox (all platforms Silverlight was on).
Looking into the SDKs and other info showed that each of these platforms were running a different build of Silverlight entirely, sporting separate APIs for the same features.
Then Microsoft announced Windows 8, only for me to find that it doesn't run Windows Phone 7 apps.
So they then later announce Windows Phone 8 which sports some of the API stack of Windows 8 but ultimately didn't run Windows 8 apps.
Then they later release Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 which for the first time ran the same apps!
But still sported drastically different features, execution of the same features and even separate app stores (though Microsoft made up for this by letting devs link one purchase to both stores).
And then there's Xbox One, which runs Windows 8 but sports a separate API stack and a separate store.
I'm not sure if Nadella is the reason why, but the moment he stepped in we get Windows 10 for desktops/laptops, phones/tablets, Xbox One and more all sporting one unified app store and API stack, something I wanted to see Microsoft do since 2007 and I know I'm not alone in having wanted these things.
Ballmer was clueless on the developer front.
If he focused on developers the way he should've from the beginning, the Zune could've even survived.
It sounds silly, but the Zune was a pre-iPhone device running an offshoot of Windows Mobile with Wi-Fi.
How Microsoft didn't push to put a browser, apps and Xbox Live games on these things I can't comprehend.
Even if it wouldn't be the best experience, it would be an experience that largely didn't exist yet at the time.
> I wonder why it took Ballmer getting out for a "developers developers developers" philosophy to actually be adopted.
At least from the outside I always got the impression he was stuck in the last decade where many thought giving our source code was only for unemployed linux geeks and competitors would steal your products. I'm not sure if he was really like that but that was almost my impression.
I know many who managed companies around the same timeframe that at least thought that way.
To be fair, I remember back in 2005'ish Microsoft reaching out to open source developer communities to help provide support for open source projects running on Windows. That was when I first remember thinking that it was interesting hearing from them at the time. I think it's not so much waiting until Ballmer was gone, but rather, it just took a while for everyone to take note of the changes. And, of course, that changing a big company like Microsoft would take some time.
But that's always been Microsoft's philosophy. Developers are central and very important to Microsoft. It's only with 3rd-party support that Windows has ever gotten as big as it has (although Microsoft did pump out TONS of quality software in the 90s, that must have helped). Microsoft has always made things easy for developers and produced high-quality development tools. Microsoft cares about API backwards-compatibility and don't "move fast and break things" like Apple does.
Now, going open-source is good too, but it's not really a "developers developers developers" thing IMO.
lucid00's comment above sums up my thoughts pretty well. It's not just becoming more friendly with open source, it's also adopting a better strategy around cross-platform support. Previously, the only "developers!" strategy they had was "never break backwards compatibility". And that didn't so much draw in developers as much as it didn't break existing apps. Backwards compatibility between different versions of Windows was never really there, random APIs and return values changing between versions... eh.
The DirectX Toolkit has been on CodePlex for years, ever since they deprecated D3DX and all of the math, texture and model handling code therein when they switched to the DirectX SDK versions that was included in the Windows SDK (Windows 7, I believe? The last standalone DirectX SDK download is the July 2010 version).
Yes. Microsoft has given the message, constantly, that they would accept pull requests. The workflow is still being worked out but many have contributed to many of the .Net components they have opened sourced.
Right now I think it's a semi manual process to bring code in house and semi automatic when it gets pushed into GitHub. At least that's what one of the last Microsoft engineers described when they were on HN a few months ago.
XNA was so amazing. At my university we used it to work with another university in Argentina to develop an XBox 360 game. It was amazing how quickly we could get things up and running.
XNA was what I used to build my first game ever. It was a magical experience to realise how quickly I could get things running. Nowadays when I go over game frameworks' documentation, I find myself thinking back to how simple xna was. Not to put down the other frameworks out there, but it felt like I'd never have been able to pick them up as easily as I did XNA.
XNA isn't in their interests any more. The niche that it aimed to fill was superseded by universal apps and the rise in popularity of cheap, fully-featured engines such as Unity.
