The most interesting part about this is how much Microsoft wants to become the de facto web dev environment that Mac currently rules and this little change speaks to that. Here’s the MSDN blog describing the changes.
In addition, however, is the Windows Subsystem for Linux. What MS has done is allow a “native” version of Ubuntu (and other flavors) to run within Windows. It is getting to the point where you can run just about anything in WSL and have direct access to your Windows file system.
This means you can set up a LAMP stack in WSL and do your development in your favorite Windows world.
It is not as flexible as Vagrant, but it is an alternate solution. We’re not quite there yet in terms of configuration, but soon – very soon.
In other dev platform news, Google is getting ready to now dominate the *nix dev environment, as well, with creating a virtual environment for Debian on ChromeOS.
Strangely, while this is going on there are rumors that Apple is going to move away from Intel in their future MacBook and other models. I assume that they’ve considered the impact of running Intel with Linux and how much the two are tied together, but one never knows what Apple will do. If they don’t provide a transition between this world and their future world, the reason to buy MacBooks may disappear.
Interesting times.