Microsoft's extended error

"Developers! Developers! Developers!" Steve Ballmer's sweat-soaked mantra, delivered in a terrifying interpretive dance of almost shamanistic intensity, is unforgettable. Indeed, Microsoft has long had a legendary devotion to the army of third-party programmers who support the Windows platform — a devotion that has been one of the wisest and most effective investments the company has ever made.

Yet one independent software vendor is now learning the downside of that intensity. It doesn't matter whether what you do is objectively good; whether it is popular, even whether it's explicitly intended to help the developer community write better code in the service of the Microsoft way. Dare to disagree with the business plan, and you are toast.

The irony of his fate is no comfort to Jamie Cansdale, the ISV currently in receipt of multiple lawyers' letters — and a great deal of bad feeling — from Microsoft. His TestDriven.NET product is designed to help programmers produce higher quality code more quickly — something Microsoft, of all organisations, should encourage. Indeed, he was nominated by the company for a Most Valuable Professional Award, a nomination swiftly withdrawn when the right hand realised that the left hand was contemplating his doom.

Where he went wrong was in adding creativity and functionality to the wrong code. Microsoft does not want anyone using Visual Studio Express for anything other than the very restricted purposes its business plan requires. The company points to an ambiguous and badly defined clause in the product's licence by way of threat — and then only after 18 months of refusing to make that objection specific.

This ignores the fact that the company has not removed the programming interfaces that make such extensions possible — what limitation is that? — that it itself uses those interfaces to add functions to the same product, and that Cansdale's purpose in his extensions is precisely aligned to the express intentions that Microsoft told us lie behind VS Express. In the product manager's own words, it is intended to encourage students and hobbyist programmers to "demand a level of customisation out of their software that doesn't exist today. It's about making the first foray into rich low-end tools very professional, to recapture the imagination of young kids, about getting next gen of programmers excited, giving them the skills they'll need in the workforce".

What better way than by allowing them to customise their development environment to learn about the latest thinking in debugging, an area of vital importance to new programmers and one normally ignored? Cansdale has said that this is exactly why he was keen to put in the work and support needed, to help the community solve a real problem.

His reward, and the reward of his users, is to be told that they are guilty of thought crime. This is self-defeating, shabby and utterly unworthy of a company that owes far more to its developers than to any one business plan. Microsoft should be delighted that its users are taking its products and making them better, not demand with menaces obedience to a business plan it can't even be bothered to follow itself. We suggest Ballmer plays a benefit gig for Mr Cansdale, revisiting that smash hit dance number with just a slight change of wording:"Apologies! Apologies! Apologies!". We hope no technical limitations get in the way.

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