The majority of IT workers are aware of Steve Ballmer's “developers, developers, developers” incantation from 2006. Earlier this year Ballmer performed a repeatof Microsoft's modern day rain dance at BUILD 2011. Due to this philosophy Microsoft have produced some pretty nice tools for developers and designers. I'm told (admittedly by a more Microsoft orientated HCIdesigner) that XAML is the dogs bollocks. I don't really mix with many other UI or HCI designers, so that maybe very biased and it's out of the scope of things I'm interested in.