A modern day David vs. Goliath battle is taking place between Microsoft and TestDriven.NET’s Jamie Cansdale over license violation. The battle has been going on for a while, more than a year to be exact, and the deadline for Jamie is 4pm Wedneday, 6th June 2007, before the wrath of Microsoft descends on him.

To make a long story short, Microsoft gives out a free version of Visual Studio, but disables some useful features, like unit testing. Jamie develops this feature for Visual Studio as an add-on in the form of TestDriven.NET, and gives that capability to the free version, which as weird as it may sound to developers of the open source world, is a violation of some lame Microsoft license.

The long battle: emails, more emails, lawyer letters, off with his head!

The anomaly (I bet only the meanest get hired for this position): Jason Weber

Intriguing: This guy is their MVP, he even uses .NET for his website; Microsoft are you sure this is the example you want to set?!

Moral of the Story
If you are a Microsoft Developer, consult your legal team before developing anything!