Bring back Jaimie
There have been a few MVP efforts over the years that I find silly. Various petitions about VB6, mass emails on unit testing, etc. There are few community “rallies” I get behind, but this is one of them.
In the recent MVP cycle (4 of them every year) Jaimie Cansdale was not re-awarded his MVP status (thanks Roy!). Okay, so what? Jaimie is the author of the most useful and popular add-in for Visual Studio, TestDriven.NET. This bothers me. Both as an MVP and a daily user of TestDriven.NET. It's a fantastic tool and it's one of those rare tools that's on my list of "install always and everywhere". I totally disagree with MS on this and think they made a mistake.
They cite that his contributions were not sufficient to re-award him his designation he previously held. The MVP program is about recognition and contribution based on the last years efforts (you don’t get awarded for future work, just what you did in the past). So what happened with Jaimie’s contributions? First, he figured out how to get his free tools to run on the free versions of Visual Studio. This, according to Microsoft, is a violation of the license. They don’t want add-ins to run on their free platform, only the ones they charge for (which I don’t agree with either). Second, he offered up his tools for free but he now offers a commercial version.
This isn’t like another MVP whose award was recently revoked by Microsoft. In that case, he was selling adware in his tools but I’m not sure of all the details. In the case of Jaimie, his commercial version is just that. A commercial version of a tool that you can choose to purchase (in order to support the author). Or not. He’s not holding a gun to anyones head. You decide if you want to support someone. It would be like me setting up a PayPal account for anyone who’s used my software to drop a quarter in the bucket so I can pay for websites and whatnot. It’s the decision of an author to do this kind of thing. Of course a commercial version of a tool takes on additional responsibility like support, but Jaimie was ready for that and that’s what you get when you purchase his tool. Or you just keep using the community edition. Your choice.
The fact that Jaimie figured out how to get free tools running with the free IDE and made it available to everyone, is stellar. While I understand MS took a position that they didn't want people building addins for the express SKUs, I think it's wrong to chastise people for it. If Roland Weiget and his excellent GhostDoc tool had the same exposure that TD.NET did, would he be facing a cease and desist notice from Microsoft?
Microsoft cites that Jaimie voilated the “MVP Code of Conduct”. I’m with Frans on this as I want to ask my lead what the hell this means? While we are bound by NDA to certain things and we’re not allowed to say post source code or confidential files to the general public, I’ve never in my brief 4 years of being an MVP heard of any official (or non-official) “code of conduct”. Maybe I’ve been living in an MVP cave?
It's sad that MS takes this approach with people that make contributions to the community like Jaimie has. Bad decision on Microsofts part and I'm sure this isn't the last we've heard of it.
Update:
Two things. First, I just bought a copy of the Professional edition of TestDriven.NET to support Jaimie. I've been using the free version but for $95 bucks, you can't go wrong. The software works with NUNit *and* VSTS and is a godsend for debugging tests and making it quick and easy for developers to do TDD. Second, I have yet to find any license agreement or statement that you cannot write add-ins for the Express editions of the Visual Studio products. While they don't provide the extensibility dlls for you to write add-ins, I don't see anything that says you're not allowed to write them (as long as you don't redistribute Microsoft dlls which isn't what Jaimie did). So if anyone knows where it explicity states you cannot do this, let me know as I'm curious. This is one of the reason that other people are saying caused Jaimie not to recieve his re-award.
Finally, I may be off in my beliefs. After reading countless other comments on this subject Frans said it best. The MVP award is about contributions to the community you make on your own dime, not necessarily a cool tool or book you've written. However IMHO Jaimies contributions earn him the award, but I'm not Microsoft so it's not my call, just my opinion.