1) The features are not evolved or indicate they are an area of focus
2) Microsoft’s knows very well they are fighting for the minds of the most important .NET developers and they have to prove to the community they ‘get it’.

I feel as an opinion only that if they blew up ReSharper it would be qute bad…

However… We all know this pattern from Microsoft as if they ‘decided it is ’strategic enough’ all bets are off.

I actually also believe however JetBrains has createed (in spite of the sheer magnitude of MSFT) very solid barriers to competition (but again, many of us though this many times before in the same spot).

Man if Microsoft goes after JetBrains on ReSharper they will have hell to pay. The ALT.NET community will form mercenary armies (grin)…

What is interesting is how coy they are being in the ‘big impact’ deliverables of say their IoC container. I do believe there is something fundamental that will attempt to push the other open source players out of consideration. Just instinct as

1) They have code out in the wild and it does show a will to innovate (unlike the refactoring code is VS 2008)
2) They are gaining all the best minds for mass-market natural trickle down of these utter common sense items to mass market usage, I know they not only assume they will own that in ORM, MVC, etc, I dont think once this Linq to Entities thing blows over they will bother to even question it as the mass market will not be allowed to consider open source. I see ‘no open source’ policies almost every day, more depending on how utterly miserable the organization is at software.

THAT IS the majority. Microsoft need to make it so idiot proof that the fundmental ‘will’ is created in these places to ‘care again if they ever cared’ about being good at software.

I am not so sure that will ever happen for the masses, as the niche spaces could likely produce enouogh specialized DSL style assets. We will see!

Damon