One main reason that I would never ever interview for MS is that I will have to ...

litewulf · on Aug 13, 2008

Everyone I know there uses Vista (unless they're using something EVEN NEWER WAHAHA)

But really, Vista-hate? Does Vista really get in the way of you opening MS Visual Studio (which seems to be the IDE of the day there)?

Create · on Aug 13, 2008

Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind...

The only reason I can imagine why Microsoft would put its programmers, device vendors, third-party developers, and ultimately its customers, through this much pain is because once this copy protection is entrenched, Microsoft will completely own the distribution channel. http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

gizmo · on Aug 13, 2008

It doesn't. But since drag'n'drop doesn't work with Vista and UAC the Visual Studio experience is really a lot worse.

pmorici · on Aug 13, 2008

I'm pretty sure a lot of the real engineers don't use visual studio. I've heard VIM is popular.

litewulf · on Aug 15, 2008

I'm pretty sure most of the engineers at Microsoft use Visual Studio.

And I'm pretty sure they run Windows too.

libber · on Aug 14, 2008

Having contracted for msft for a few years I can tell you what you should already expect - it varies.

There are the fanatics that insist on using vista and live search instead of google because anything else would be "helping our competitors".

There are the normal xp/vista + VS people, I would wager most people fall into this category.

Then there are the awesome crazy ones, the people who write the .net CLR and windows drivers and stuff seem to use VS, source insight or emacs.

There are also macs around, but very few. There are a lot of tablet PCs, I think msft itself is the worlds largest consumer of those things.

bsk26 · on Aug 13, 2008

During my internship (summer 07) I was encouraged to use XP instead of Vista. Both my boss and mentor used it. Though this may be atypical, I don't think anyone cares what you run as long as you get your work done.

Don't know why you would want to use XP though, it seems pretty old and funky these days. And who really wants to check for spyware every day or two. I choose to use vista, but did a good deal of my coding in emacs, and kept ubuntu on my home machine.