A copy of TechNet Magazine arrived in my mailbox yesterday. The content of this magazine is usually too straight forward and useful for a developer to use as it targets IT professionals so I usually end up throwing it on one of my co-workers desks where I imagine it goes unread and then is used to coat the floor of the office gerbil's cage. The gerbil did however setup a layered anti-spam solution yesterday on our Exchange server.

I managed to do a quick read of said magazine, and came across Blog Tales written by Betsy Aoki. While the history of blogging at Microsoft was somewhat interesting in a historical perspective, what really caught my attention was this:

"The part you can't download and try at home is the delivery mechanism that Microsoft.com uses to generate lists of links to blog posts and blog home pages. Known as Smart Components, this system represents proprietary code we don't give out, but we are happy to share the concepts of how to do it."

See this bright shiny code? Pretty isn't it? It might even solve a problem you are having. Well too bad, you can't have it! Please forget we ever mentioned it.

Usually I am for the spread of knowledge in all its myriad forms, but in this case I was happier not knowing about Microsoft's proprietary solution. The proceeding description and diagram of Smart Components was so useless I think I am dumber for having read it. I am still meditating on such pearls of wisdom as: "...we suck RSS down, we snazzy it up, we toss it out, we share it with you."

Don't tell me you are willing to "share the concepts" and not provide any technical details, or at least a link to the technical details. Even more infuriating was that they are replacing Smart Components with an entirely new system code named Helios and/or Athens because Smart Components just isn't cutting it, so what was the point of telling us any of this in the first place?

I get that there are many cool projects and pieces of code inside Microsoft that aren't going to be shared with the community for free, but there is no reason to rub it in our faces. Let me live a happier life not knowing you have the answer to my problems.