Ted Neward writes

So if I need a custom build task to do ASP.NET deployment, do I build a NAnt task knowing its lifetime is probably scoped to this Whidbey beta cycle? Or do I build a MSBuild task knowing that it'll probably be two years before it's really useful, and that it's entirely likely that I'll have to rewrite it at least once or twice in the meantime? Recommendation: Don't try to "build a better tool" originating out of the open-source community; choose instead to support the community by adopting it into the IDE or toolchain and commit resources to develop on it if it doesn't do what you want.

I tend to disagree with Ted. The big problem that Microsoft faces in this space is that developers tend to want all their tools to come from a single vendor. Ted shows this mentality himself by implying that even though an existing 3rd party tool to perform the tasks he wants exists (Nant) he'd rather wait for vaporware from Microsoft (MSBuild). Here I use the term vaporware to describe any product that has been announced and demoed but not released.

This problem means that Microsoft is constantly being hit with a barrage of requests by developers to implement technologies when existing 3rd party products can satisfy the needs of our developers. For example, our team constantly gets requests from developers who'd like the equivalent of a full fledged XML development environments like XML Spy in Visual Studio.

My personal opinion is that Microsoft should build what it thinks the essentials are for developers into their development tools and the .NET Framework then provide extensibility hooks for others to plugin and extend the existing functionality as needed. Contrary to the tone of Ted's post the Visual Studio team isn't averse to shipping third party plugins in the box as witnessed by its inclusion of Dotfuscator Community Edition with Visual Studio.NET 2003. Ironically, the first review of Visual Studio.NET I could find  that mentions Dotfuscator contains this text in the conclusion

 I was kind of hoping that Microsoft was developing an obfuscator in-house that would be completely integrated into Visual Studio .NET

Yet another request for Microsoft to produce a tool when third party tools exist and one is even included in the box. Even if the Visual Studio team considered Nant another third party tool they'd want to ship in this manner I'm sure the fact that it is licensed under the GNU Public Licence (GPL) would give them cause for pause.

The other reason I disagree with Ted is that I believe in competition. I don't think the existence of WinAmp and Quicktime should mean Windows Media player shouldn't exist, the existence of Borland's IDEs mean Visual Studio shouldn't exist or the existence of Yahoo! Mail means Hotmail shouldn't exist. I definitely don't think that the existence of a developer tool or API being produced by Microsoft or a third party precludes anyone else from developing one. The mentality that only one tool or one technology should exist in a given space is what is stifling to competition and community building not the fact that Microsoft develops some technology that overlaps with something similar some other entity is building.