Microsoft vs. TestDriven.NET
This article is revisited here.
There is an ongoing conflict between Microsoft and Jamie Cansdale regarding TestDriven.NET.
I think Microsoft is really wrong here. Is anybody really going to buy one of the non-free Visual Studio SKU’s because they want TestDriven to work? The companies that are so cheap that they don’t use the ‘real’ Visual Studio SKU’s now will probably not buy them anyway. It is still possible to run the unit test outside of Visual Studio so the cost isn’t justified for TestDriven alone.
If Microsoft is afraid that there will be lots of other plug ins for the Express SKU’s they should make the license clear. It is not hard to state that it is against the license to extend the product in any way. If it is true that they have the same license for the commercial SKU’s as the free ones then all external plug ins that didn’t come via the VSIP program should be stopped.
This way of treating the community makes me go to SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop for all .NET work I do independent of my employer and contractors.
If all students looking at .NET do the same the incentive to buy Visual Studio when they start to program for a living will go away. Maybe they will even jump the .NET train and go for another development stack.
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8 Responses to “Microsoft vs. TestDriven.NET”
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[...] Jason Webber, the Microsoft PM who needs to brush up on his communication skills, while Chris and Johan both wonder why Microsoft are trying to mess around with their developer community in this fashion [...]
I’ve been trying to post to Jamie’s blog for 48 hours. Jamie has chosen not to let my posts get through so I’m going to speak my mind on as many blogs as I can. The fact that Jamie let’s responses through which support his position all the while deleting posts that question his opinion is the the hypocrisy of “open source communities”.
I maintain the internal build tools for our company. We have over 1Mil lines of .Net code in C# localized in 5 languages so you can imagine the challenges in build and deployment. We have custom Add-Ins, MSBuild stuff, old VSIP stuff, Macros and other stuff like autocomplete files. Having debugged why our custom tools don’t work on C# Express I can say with 100% certainty that the API’s aren’t exposed for Express to use Add-Ins without some sort of hacking.
Dan Fernandez just explained how TestDriven works
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/06/01/testdriven-net-and-express-technical-information.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage
I knew this thing was a hack to use Add-In from the second I read the post. Now I know why Jamie wouldn’t post my blog post because it would have exposed him earlier. Thanks to Microsoft for being honest.
Blogs are not a democracy so I’m post this on several hoping that someone open to reality other than Jamie’s will let me share my thoughts. It makes me want to start blogging and pis*ses me off. My first post is going to be about Jamie. Time for me to visit userland.
You don’t need TestDrive and Express. You can find MSDN download subscription numbers and passwords online if you look in the right places which allow you to download VSTSTS for free. Once one of you get it you can just share with all of your friends. The MS unit test stuff is better anyway. I think it’s crazy to pay for VStudio.
I have a legal MSDN subscription so that doesn’t really bother me, but I think it is really wrong to create software for sale with pirated/stolen tools.
/johan/
Microsoft doesn’t need to make money on tools. The steal enough money from the world on windows and sql. I hope Jamie keeps hacking Express to add full VSTS features like source code control and modeling and domain languages and bug tracking stuff. tools = free. Jamie has a good hack going and needs to keep up the work.
[...] part in a controversial discussion. This is something I did at idstam.com when the legal status of TestDriven.NET was questioned by Microsoft. That post gave me more [...]
[...] light of the recent controversy of using plugins in Visual Studio Express and getting some inspiration after listening to the [...]
[...] light of the recent controversy of using plugins in Visual Studio Express and getting some inspiration after listening to the [...]