Benefits of choosing Windows over Unix as development platform

Question

Are there any technical benefits to Windows/Microsoft as a platform to use while developing, over a Unix dialect such as Linux or Solaris?

I know that companies choose Microsoft at times because there's simply not enough programmers available that know Unix, or that these programmers are much more expensive to hire.

So assuming all developers knew Unix and Microsoft equally well, would there still be cases where you are better off developing in Windows?

Answer 1

To me there's only two arguments for using Windows as a dev platform:

1. You have to because you're doing .Net/Windows development (or because the company simply gives you no choice); or
2. The apps, specifically Microsoft Office/Exchange. I'm sorry but OpenOffice is dreadful in comparison to Word/Excel.

Apart from that imho Linux has every other advantage including:

• MUCH faster filesystem (particularly important when dealing with lots of small files). Last year I went from a build time of 8-10 minutes to 2-3 just by this switch (ant build of same code base);
• Typically your dev environment then matches your production environment (if you're production environment is Windows your dev environment will be Windows almost guaranteed), which can be useful. We've had issues with Java classpath visibility because of differences between JBoss on Windows and Linux; and
• A much better set of command line tools (yes I knwo you can use Cygwin, etc but it's not as good).

That's one reason why I find the idea of a Mac as my next dev workstation so appealling: you can look it as either Unix with applications (ie Office) or Windows with a decent filesystem (will be even better if/when OSX adopts ZFS), either way it's a win. The only thing that's really put me off is that Apple does stupid things like delay Java 6 release by a year just so they can put the Leopard Look and Feel in.