After many years of using Mac OS and Linux nearly exclusively, I’m in a job where I’m using a Windows PC and having to write programs targeted at Windows users in Microsoft-created languages. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to deal with the Evil Empire more than cursorily. Some observations, good and bad:

Good

• ASP.NET is a surprisingly well-thought-out development platform. It’s very good at keeping code and presentation separate, allows for modular design at a number of different levels, and allows you to do a lot of things declaratively instead of programmatically. It’s pretty fab for creating CRUD web applications.
• C# is a pretty nice language. It’s not Python, but it does have a lot of nice features, including “delegates”, which almost let you believe that functions are first-class.
• Visual Studio is really an amazing product. Intellisense is brilliant; a lot of times, you can type a couple of words, and then basically autocomplete your code. I hate to say it, but it might be on par with Emacs as a powerful IDE.

Basically, most of their tools for development are extremely well-done. The big problems crop up when they try to use those tools to create anything else:

Bad

Windows.

Oh, God, how I hadn’t missed this. Having to run anti-malware software because the OS is too dumb to prevent itself from getting infected in the first place. No way to conveniently enter characters that aren’t on the keyboard (I can has em-dash?) Third-party apps to do anything useful (you didn’t really want to play DVDs, did you?). Applications that require the use of the context menu to do important tasks. Stupid “Are You Sure?” confirmation dialogs. Rebooting because you changed the color of the desktop.

The thing that really, really agitates me, though, is the lack of control of the computer that Windows provides. Windows frequently decides that what it’s doing is more important than what you’re doing. You’ve got the start menu open, and an application starts up? The start menu’s gone; now you’re working with the application. Fire up an application, and then switch to another one while it’s loading? The new app will steal focus back when it creates its first window. Windows thinks you need to clean up your desktop/install anti-virus software/brush your teeth? Look, a little popup in the taskbar, getting me away from what I’m working on. And the modal dialog boxes!! Sure, you see them occasionally in any environment, but man, I run into a lot of them here. The bottom line in any computing environment is that I am supposed to be in control. At all times. The machine exists to serve me, not the other way around.

Internet Explorer 6

The bane of developers and users everywhere. Insecure. Buggy as crap. No debugging features that compare to other browsers. Unaware of standards that had existed for YEARS before it was released that every other browser has somehow managed to competently support . When you write a web app, you basically have to write your app twice; once for web browsers, and again for IE 6. It warmed my heart to see that IE 6 is not supported by the “new Facebook”, which will soon be the only way to use Facebook. Hopefully if another big player or two gives IE 6 the treatment it so richly deserves, it’ll be relegated to the junk heap before Microsoft officially puts a bullet in its head in July of 2010.

Outlook

Big. Evil. Doesn’t work well with anything other than Exchange. Clumsy, clumsy user interface. I was aghast to find that you can’t do ad-hoc searches of your mail. You want to find that message about TPS reports from a few days ago? Create a new search folder, make a new filter to tell it that you’re searching the whole message, type in “TPS”, save the folder, click on it, and wait. Then delete it when you’re done. On a Mac? Command-option-F TPS. Or Command-Space TPS and look through your entire system. People need to be able to search their mail quickly and conveniently. (Oh, and I hear that the HTML rendering engine in the new version of Outlook is the same one that Office uses, taking the dubious task of writing HTML email that will display reasonably on many clients from the realm of “difficult” to “impossible”.)