PowerToys going open source
Yesterday I wrote something about the new PowerToys, and compared them to the other alternatives. I you read that post, you'll see the comments of Josh Ledgard of MS:
Hi Jan. I'm one of the guys at Microsoft who works on the Power Toys. I wanted to let you know a little bit about the PowerToys effort. I promise that we didn't work on these projects to displace third party tools. I actually think that all of the commenting tools you mention have their plusses and minuses. And at the moment some are more polished than the one our team released. One of the motivations included giving people samples from Microsoft for extending the shell. You can never have too many samples. Another is that we just thought it would be a cool project to work on and provide a forum for other developers in the community to also work on. Actually, we've been in contact with the writer of the VBXC tool you mentioned and he has recently joined our workspace project on gotdotnet that allows for other people to modify the code. If your interested feel free to check out our workspaces.. http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/MessageBoard/Thread.aspx?id=107870
Thanks,
josh
I think Josh is completly right: you can't have too many samples and it's a cool project to work on! And ofcourse they did not start these projects to kill similar third party tools. I hope my previous post wasn't misunderstood, because I was trying to say that I really like the initiative. And going open source to the GotDotNet workspaces only makes it better:
So Josh, I hope you read this post too: keep up the good work, and thanks for commenting on my blog (it's kinda cool MS guys/girls are reading this ;-)!