In context, the Windows Paul was talking about used C, a horrific low level SDK, and a technology called COM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

.NET did not appear until much later.

.NET integrates well with COM. You are using it all the time under the hood. COM was difficult because it was an OO framework that had to deal with:

- C++ ABIs that changed on every compiler update but still had to work.

-Support for C and Assembly which had no OO support at all.

-Liteweight enough to run on a computer with 8MB of RAM total.

Given these constraints it's unlikely you would do any better.

Why do you think I didn't respect the technology?

I'm just providing a counterweight to the "horrific" description. It was and still is pretty bad if you can't use the modern wrappers. But it served an important purpose and wasn't really possible any other way.

Developing ruby on rails apps is config hell though with windows

There's a difference between developing on Windows and developing for Windows.

I had a different experience with Visual Studio. The IDE is slow with visible lag when typing, the menus are completely unintuitive for a person coming from Linux.

Creating a "solution" (who came up with that word?) is absolutely horrible compared to just opening a file in vi/emacs.

There does not appear to be a command line debugger -- while the debugger is good, graphical debuggers are a pain to use.