Welcome to The Pragmatic Engineer. I’m your host, Gergely Orosz, and today we’re celebrating 50 years of Microsoft and developer tools with Scott Guthrie. Scott, who’s been at Microsoft for 28 years, takes us from the company’s earliest efforts—building BASIC interpreters and Visual Basic, “tools built to allow less technically savvy people to build things”—through the revolution of .NET and C#.

We dig into why Visual Basic faced resistance despite “simplifying development,” how .NET brought a new generation of server-side developers into Microsoft’s ecosystem, and why Windows Phone, with all its promise, didn’t succeed. Scott shares lessons from moving Azure from seventh place to the number two cloud provider and explains the philosophy behind VS Code and the GitHub acquisition.

Looking forward, Scott is excited about AI enhancing productivity while creating more engineering jobs, and he urges us to “embrace the technology that’s coming.” Join us for a whirlwind tour of Microsoft’s transformation—and stay pragmatic.
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