> Jamie,

> We just noticed that you recently re-enabled extensions to our Visual
> Studio Express products:
> http://weblogs.asp.net/nunitaddin/archive/2007/04/02/express-sku-supp...

> This is extremely disappointing. We spent a lot of time last year
> explaining to you, over a period of many months, that our Express
> products are not designed or intended to be extensible. As we also
> explained to you many times, our license terms for the Express
> products do not permit extending them with new functionality or by
> enabling access to latent Visual Studio functionality that we
> purposely de-activated for our Express products. Your various
> extensions, in both their former and current incarnations, necessarily
> violate those license terms and infringe our rights in our products.
> You are also putting your own customers in a difficult position, since
> you are encouraging them to breach the license terms, too.

> We thought that you ultimately recognized this, when you withdrew
> support for Express from your products last year. We can't help but
> conclude that, by re-enabling Express support now, in light of all of
> our conversations (including the email exchange below in February),
> you have consciously decided to flout our rights.

> What makes this especially puzzling is that you are undermining the
> economic model that you rely on for your own products. Nearly all
> software vendors offer limited versions of their products for nominal
> or no cost, often as a marketing or entry-level tool. More
> sophisticated or feature-rich versions of the same software are then
> supplied at a higher price. We do this with Visual Studio Express (our
> free products) and Visual Studio Standard and above (our commercial
> products). You use this model for your own products, the "Personal,"
> Professional" and "Enterprise" versions of TestDriven.NET. Your
> actions subvert the model that we all rely on.

> Instead of extending Express, I'd urge you again to focus your energy
> and talents on extending our commercial Visual Studio products, under
> the terms of our publicly available VSIP program. Hundreds of other
> partners are successfully doing this, all the while respecting the
> restrictions on extending the Express products. There's no reason why
> TestDriven.NET can't be successful doing this, too.

> We'd really like to resolve this amicably. Please remove support for
> our Express products from your software as soon as possible. Please
> also let me know when you have done this, and confirm that you will
> not make such support available in the future. If you do not remove
> support by that date, then this matter will be out of my hands and I
> will have to turn this over to the lawyers. I really hope it does not
> come to that.

> Thank you, Jason Weber