I was suitably impressed that Dan provided feedback to my previous post re the patent around the Object Test Bench v’s BlueJ issue in which he covers the two points I was trying to make:
- The patent shouldn’t have happened – congrats to the team for admitting that they are only human and that mistakes do happen. Along with the BlueJ community (which I don’t actually belong as I think this is flogging a dead horse) I’m interested to see the answer to “why did this happen in the first place”. I think they would also like to see some attribution of the work that was done in this area prior to VS2005.
- The second point was that OTB has limited use – why do I say this and what features would I ask for? I appreciate that Microsoft is always listening to the community (for which I’m very impressed) but these two bits of feedback were either ignored or sidelined as not important:
- OTB only works with the project that is marked as startup – and this includes class libraries. If you are working on a class library (as part of an application) and you want to try something with a class you have to set that project to be the startup, experiment with the class, then set the application back to being the startup project
- OTB has no memory – you can establish quite complex object graphs only to have them blown away when you rebuild/make changes to your application.
I’m sure there are other bits of feedback that I would provide on the OTB but these are the two sore points from my point of view. Thanks again Dan for opening the discussion on the future of the OTB