I doubt that before WSL this would be something. I mean developing on windows was always far lot difficult than Linux or MacOS.

Win32 API isn't nice, but Microsoft was always relatively good with documentation etc. and don't forget all the developer support within Excel, VBA, Visual basic etc. Bill Gates early on understood the premise of building a platform and not breaking it. Even if that meant win32 API became ugly over time. Old windows programs still work on newer releases.

It depends on what you were developing.

You wouldn't know it looking at MS Visual Studio though.

What makes you say that? I love to hate on Microsoft, wouldn’t touch Windows with a 100ft pole, but I always give credit to Microsoft for VS, VS Code (and my favorite languages, TS and C#).

I admittedly haven’t used Visual Studio in a while (though I use VS Code daily) but I remember it as my favorite IDE. Certainly better than XCode, and I even preferred it to IntelliJ.

To the credit of teams past, SSMS still does not have an electron-based equal (azure data studio will get there its not there yet).