This feels more like an internal turf war inside Microsoft. The general open source strategy with .NET Core and VS Code has been running long enough that I don't think it's just a smoke screen. But there's probably plenty of different interests inside Microsoft that are at least partially in conflict.

The Azure side probably doesn't care about selling Visual Studio, but they care about developer mindshare and reputation. The Visual Studio side seems to be in a more difficult position, I assumed they can just live from the enterprise/everyone else split and focus on enterprise-y stuff to still sell Visual Studio. But it looks a bit to me like VS Code and the .NET cli have become more of a competition than they'd like.

And the worst mistake here might not have been pissing off the .NET community, but pissing of the people working on .NET for Microsoft. I mean in the end this is the same, but pissing off the people working on .NET would result in a much more thorough destruction of trust with the community in the end.

But I have zero inside knowledge here, might just be weird decisions driven by internal politics or whatever.

There are people on record that it was the Azure division head Scott Guthrie who gave permission to open source ASP.NET Core (which at the time was part of Azure). Later the asp.net team merged with the .net team and brought the open sourcing with them.

VS has no place anymore. The velocity and mindshare is with VS Code. VS with its visual designers had its place .. but desktop is dead and Xamarin competes with frameworks without costly IDEs.

Has anything ever actually replaced VS?

I've only ever used VS for hobby/side projects, and even 10 years ago it was leaps and bounds better than what I have to use for my professional day to day work now (code completion, debugger are the two things that I miss basically every day).

The tools that I use now have these features, but they're such a joke in comparison. The code completion has no notion of "code", it's just looking for similar words.

For many workloads (at least .NET), JetBrains Rider.

For C/C++ on Windows, well, you have VS Code and also JetBrains CLion, but IMO CLion is surprisingly rougher than Rider, even though it's older. You can get stuff done though.

Rider is a non-starter - doesn't even have a community edition.

It costs less than a cup of coffee a day. Complaining about the price is a nonstarter.

It's not really about the cost. It's about the principle of having to pay any amount of money to be able to do development work at all with your preferred choice of OS/editor.

Attaching a price to your ability to onboard a language with your favorite workflow changes how you view that language and the motives of its maintainers when compared to the alternatives for that platform. Java has no such barrier to adoption on Linux, for example, because IntelliJ happens to have a community edition.

Visual Studio also has a community edition.

[1] https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

[2] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/license-terms/mlt031819/