Late To The Table Again

Update:

The evidence this time has caused Microsoft to withdraw the patent over the last few days. The BlueJ Java people, who already credited Smalltalk, had been in recent contact with Microsoft prior to the application and were very upset about the patent application. Bad press was visibly having a negative affect.

Would that it were this way with the less direct instances of prior art. No kudos to Microsoft here -- this is a case of one's back to the wall and the spotlight shining down from the police helicopter -- you're about to be on a reality show.

End

James Robertson writes about another Microsoft patent application in the 21st century that consists of prior art from the 1990s if not earlier.

Here are some other candidates for prior art from what I can tell. (I can only read so much about Visual Studio and then I begin to lose my lunch.)

• The Smalltalk "diagramming debugger" is from the 1980s. Ironically the author, Ward Cunningham, worked for Microsoft for a few years.
• The Smalltalk "Object Explorer" is currently included as a goodie with VisualWorks Smalltalk I think. This is by Kent Beck and goes back to the same time frame when Ward and Kent were at Tektronix.

Maybe someone more at peace with Visual Studio can say whether these diagrams resemble what has been patented. (I am sure the newer tools have much more suckage.)

Diagramming Debugger

Object Explorer

Semantic Agnostics?

There's a comment over on James' blog stating a key part of the Microsoft patent may be it's "language semantics agnostic". Get over it. All the languages that can participate in this diagrammer have to share the dotnet object model and enough of the dotnet runtime to get the bits to the display. If that's not "semantics" then what is it? Well, it's actually pretty *bad* semantics to make all these languages use the same (pretty awful) object model.

Fighting The Good Fight

Fuzzy has a good idea: a site for bad software patents with the details, prior art, etc.