This is a great perspective, and I do would like to bring in a few good things from the dead years: (1) XNA was revolutionizing in a way, Microsoft opened the doors for indie development for the Xbox 360 and it was really amazing... MonoGame was spun out of the XNA platform being discontinued by MS, and I do appreciate the fact that they were great at building the XNA framework; (2) Windows Phone8/8.1 was a great alternative to iOS and even more so to Android, I really loved my Windows phone (the tiles was great, the child space really helped me when I was out with my kids); (3) Developing for the Windows phone and the emulator was a breeze compared to Android, the emulator was top notch; and (4) purchasing Nokia was excellent strategy, sadly it was not executed well and a huge opportunity was missed.

Now I did not worked for MS, but as a third party developer I miss a ton of knowledge, tools, and features provided to develop software. I do love working with Azure and have deployed several services and applications (I do have no love for ASP.NET). Also, I moved on from XNA to MonoGame to Unity (their 2021 release was re-compiling too often) and now to GoDot. After doing mobile for Windows Phone, I switched to Android (Java and Kotlin), iOS with (Swift), and finally went to Delphi (with all the inner knowledge on the native tools it has been pretty good overall).