Visual Studio does have quite a few improvements, specially in what concerns debugging asynchronous code and DirectX.
Unity is now a first class citizen for development of games on Windows.
Windows 8.1 brings quite a few new APIs, better interaction with .NET projections.
JIT, GC and ASP.NET improvements.
The message is, they could have thrown a RSS Reader attitude to .NET, instead they are paying developers to fix those issues.
As for paying for stuff, welcome to the commercial world. Microsoft is not the only vendor selling developer tools, although it looks like that when reading HN.
With MSDN subscriptions you get lots of those things for "free" for the timeframe the subscription is valid.
> I am an MSDN subscriber as are the other 100 people we employ. Definitely not free.
It is a matter of scale.
The type of companies I work for, the MSDN subscription is done at enterprise level. Sure it is expensive, but still cheaper than buying individual products, and gives the liberty to access new software versions.
It feels as if it was free, hence my quotes around free.
> Compare to the Java EE ecosystem.
True, in many things the Java ecosystem is more open source friendly, because the money comes from consulting or selling books, not from direct sale of tooling.
Ever tried to develop Eclipse Ecore plugins without buying the books from Eclipse Foundation?
I am fully aware of it, my employer was a Java/C++ shop until 2009, date when we started delivery .NET solutions additionally.
On the world consulting world my employer targets, there are lots of commercial tools to chose from,
