Visual Studio's codebase is 20 years old, and it wasn't built with cross-platform support in mind. It uses WPF as the UI toolkit, which is only supported on Windows. Stripping it down would most likely take an order of magnitude more work than just writing a new editor from scratch.
Do you have a source on the usage of WPF? Since it's a really new product compared to Visual Studio itself, I'd be surprised. Anyways, implementing something like a WPF-Gtk shim is not hard, especially for someone as big as Microsoft. The problem, AFAIK, lies in the usage of Windows API.
Core parts of VS's UI (editor, shell) were rewritten in WPF in VS2010, and it's been the default framework for anything newly added or overhauled since then. Some parts of VS still use other UI frameworks though, which makes it even harder to port. (and as you say the UI stuff is just one aspect of VS's very broad Windows API usage).
Heh, yes and he did understand that as well. I actually had to look up the release dates because of your comment :)
> Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF) is a graphical subsystem [...] was initially released as part of .NET Framework 3.0[...].
> .NET Framework 3.0. release date
>> 2006-11-06
> Visual Studio Release Date
>> First entry on Wikipedia is Visual Studio 97 (1997). It was already Version 5 at that point. So even older I guess.
Professionally speaking WPF is still pretty young. Or at least a lot of developers think like that . There is still a lot of Software being maintained in Visual Basic, Windows Forms and whatever previous Frameworks existed. though it is pretty mainstream at this point, so most people just starting with the Microsoft SDKs never touch anything earlier than WPF.
