Actually in a fair number of situations that is exactly the case - including the GUI bits. For non-trivial business / news / info apps you can get well over 90% of your code straight compiled with no changes and often you can push that very close to 100%.

On the other hand, you still retain full access to the underlying OS API and of course for games or apps that want to perform UI tricks and interact with specific hardware features then you will simply isolate that bit of specific code for each device OS.

it is really good stuff.

I disagree. Windows10 runs pretty well on even little Dell tablets with only 2GB of ram and no significant processor power. On one of these compute sticks it should actually run fine.

These boards don't use an on-board dev ecosystem, they use a dev PC and download the resulting code. To be fair, you could use the command line .net compilation / assembly tools and build code on them but there is no point. Simply connect it up to a system running Visual Studio and enjoy the full IDE, step debugging and so on. Since they run the .net core you have access to a huge library of packages and support tools.

This. All of this. More and more clients who traditionally went AWS (advertising campaign back ends, social media startups and so on) are picking Azure. The AWS tools are just crude in comparison and the Azure offerings are typically more complete, more robust and much better documented.

3-4 years ago suggest Azure hosting was suicide for a potential contract, these days it is an advantage and makes the guys pushing AWS look like they aren't keeping up. The perception is shifting fast.

No, these days that makes you a racist somehow.

That was awesome :)