Chris Posted June 6, 2007 Report Share Posted June 6, 2007 What's the best way to attract a pile of threatening lawyers' letters from Microsoft? Sell pirate copies of Windows? Write a DRM-busting program?Londoner Jamie Cansdale has just discovered a new approach. He had the temerity to make Redmond's software better.As a hobby, Cansdale developed an add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio. TestDriven.NET allows unit test suites to be run directly from within the Microsoft IDE. Cansdale gave away this gadget on his website, and initially received the praises of Microsoft.In fact, Microsoft was so pleased with him, it gave him a Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) award, which it says it gives to "exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who voluntarily share their high quality, real world expertise with others".However, his cherished status did not last. In December 2005, he started getting emails from a Microsoft executive called Jason Weber. The problem was that TestDriven.NET supported the Express edition of Visual Studio. Express is the cut-down version that anyone can download for free from the Microsoft website. It is limited in various ways, and is intended only for hobbyists and students. Everyone else is supposed to shell out for the paid-for versions.In fact, as a .NET hobbyist himself, Cansdale says he used Express to develop TestDriven.NET. Ironically, he only got access to a fancier version of Visual Studio as part of his MVP goody-bag.But MS doesn't want you supporting Visual Studio Express with your add-ons.More | Here Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PattyJohnson Posted June 13, 2007 Report Share Posted June 13, 2007 MS Side of story :D"we’ve been asking him in multiple emails and conference calls to stop extending (just Express) since before Visual Studio 2005 even shipped, (ie they were talking for 2 years). We even got the General Manager of Visual Studio to personally talk to him on the phone to plead with him to remove Express extensibility. Closely following that, Jamie took the violations to heart and removed Visual Studio Express extensibility for several months. Only recently did he decide to add Express support back to TestDriven.NET and only after another round of conversations and close to two years of trying to avoid escalating this situation, we felt compelled to deliver our message in a different form." http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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