Developing Code out of the goodness of their hearts? No. Developing Code as part of some convoluted marketing strategy that cannot be measured? Also no.<p>More likely they&#x27;re developing Code to compete with Sublime Text and the like. They don&#x27;t have a product in that market and Microsoft&#x27;s strategy is what it&#x27;s always been: gaining marketshare.<p>Microsoft&#x27;s success is [now] defined by developers active on MS technology. It underlies the open-sourcing of technologies long held proprietary, as well as the responsiveness to developer feedback.<p>Long term, I suspect the theory is if MS has a majority stake in the developer market, it can start defining the technology the world runs on (again). Its more of a give-take relationship though, with MS devoting resources to the resources developers actually use.