I’ll disagree with your assertion, though. Microsoft absolutely has the luxury to release sub-standard or incomplete work due to their numerous revenue streams and power in the industry. They should understand how their actions and output will be received, but they are not obliged to understand, and they frequently do not. Case in point: Oxite. Case in point: the architectural guidance on REST and DDD just released by Patterns & Practices. Case in point: their complete ignorance of web standards in browsers through IE6 and their developer platform and tooling.

If it’s a Microsoft-branded duck, I’m not going to make any assumptions about it. I’m going to verify that it doesn’t fart instead of quack. Oxite and the control adapter toolkit are very different. I am familiar with the controversy, and I see little relevance. Oxite is a farting duck. They are now trying to position Oxite as sample code, but when it was released the MIX site made a number of extraordinary claims, like:

Oxite was developed carefully and painstakingly to be a great blog sample, or a starting point for your own web site project with CMS needs. Its line-up of sexy attributes includes: provider-based architecture allowing you to swap out database and search providers (SQL Server DB, local and Live search providers included), built for testability and hence most likely to be voted “hottest in class” by TDD fans (repositories, everything has an interface, etc.)….

The MIX site still leads off, “Oxite… can run anything from blogs to big web sites. We know this because it runs MIX Online.” Sure, it says sample, but they also claimed that it was production-ready (it wasn’t), battle tested on one of Microsoft’s showcase sites (okay), and yes — built with best practices (absolutely false). That’s why they got raked over the coals. They established expectations that they couldn’t deliver on. Now they’re engaging the community and the MVC team at Microsoft, but they’ve lost their credibility. The MIX team clearly did not understand how their product would be received. On the other hand, the control adapters were never marketed as anything other than sample code.

Your expectations are your own, and if the control adapters didn’t meet them that’s fair. They met my expectations, and quacked just like they claimed they would, and didn’t tear up the lawn or terrorize the kids. I accept the value they provide, and don’t try to make them do things they weren’t intended to do. I sometimes tweak the code from project to project, and if I really need them to do more, then I can roll up my sleeves and change them myself. That’s the beauty of open source software. Microsoft granted them to the community almost two years ago. It seems misguided to blame Microsoft for any perceived shortcomings since then.

Anyway, I’m done on this subject. Like I said above, there are other things I regret more than using these control adapters, and there are other areas I’d rather focus my attention in future posts.

Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the controversy surrounding Oxite. The MIX team released it as a “code sample” only, and despite many repeated and breathless caveats that it wasn’t a “best-practices” example, they got taken to the woodshed over it — by those in other divisions of MS itself, no less. As well they should have.

I would assert that no one under the auspices of the Microsoft “umbrella” has the luxury of putting out sloppy, buggy, and imcomplete work and hiding that fact behind the “code sample” fig leaf. They have an obligation to try to understand how their “samples” will be perceived, embraced, and adopted by the community. If the community perceives it as a MS-endorsed offering, then that’s what it will be treated as — despite what MS themselves may say to the contrary. To most of us, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.

However, I enjoyed the post. It was thoughtful and well written. I have subscribed to your blog and hope you write more frequently in the future.

By the way, feel free to view my response:
http://leedumond.com/blog/blog-etiquette-the-art-of-the-duel/