There is an interesting discussion here (including Scott Guthrie) about Microsoft's relationship to the vibrant .NET open source community.  I agree with the general premise that this relationship needs some work to prevent (ultimately) the stifling of open source innovation.

 

Take unit testing, for example.  We've had NUnit for a long time (which has evolved far beyond its JUnit inspiration in many ways), and now we have mbUnit as well.  We even have TestDriven.NET to run all this directly right in the VS.NET IDE.  Yet for some reason, Microsoft invented its own unit testing framework and bundled it with Visual Studio .NET 2005 Really Expensive Edition.  I know that others have commented on this before, with many concluding that NUnit/mbUnit remain superior to Microsoft's solution for a variety of reasons.  Nonetheless, a solution provided and blessed by Microsoft carries extra weight in many organizations.  I have always found this rather frustrating on a couple of counts.

 

First off, I don't like the implication that unit testing is a "team system" feature.  Whether you "test first" or "test later", I think everybody pretty much now agrees that you need to perform automated developer testing sometime, no matter what kind of work you're doing.  Microsoft sends the wrong message by only including unit testing tools in Team System.

 

But more importantly for this discussion, the inclusion of a feature like this from Microsoft sows FUD around the excellent and successful NUnit and mbUnit projects and fragments the developer community's knowledge about the frameworks.  (Fortunately, by only including their custom framework in Team System, Microsoft has probably accidentally ensured continued life for NUnit/mbUnit.)

 

Let me pose one simple question:  If JetBrains can include JUnit integration in its for-profit IDE, why couldn't Microsoft do the same with NUnit in Visual Studio?  I suspect the answer has something to do with lawyers.

 

I submit that a possible solution here would be to establish some sort of community process.  Probably not exactly like the Java Community Process (JCP), but there should at least be some way for interested developers in the community who are passionate about a particular solution to a problem that Microsoft has not addressed to be able to transition their work into the platform -- all without causing MS lawyers' brains to explode.  The .NET developer community gets to collaborate on building excellent solutions, and Microsoft gets to move best-of-breed work into Visual Studio and the .NET Framework faster and without having to pay to reinvent it themselves.  In the long term, everybody in the .NET ecosystem would benefit tremendously from this.