Today I was surprised to get a reply from Ingo Rammer regarding my post the other day about developer thought patterns. (He saw a link from me in his referrer log). Anyway, he explained his motiviations for using Outlook and Exchange as his platform for bridging e-mail and weblogs:
First, I’m a consultant, trainer and commercial developer. Whenever I don’t have a gig at a given time, I instead play with the technologies at hand (aka "learn"). This time, I wanted to play with ASP.NET (simply because I haven’t yet done so) and at the same time wanted to get rid of my closed weblog tool.
I took Ingo’s project out of context, and assumed that his motivation for creating it was just "to make a weblog-to-mail-client bridge", and wondered why he has chosen such a heavyweight platform. But in turns out that the whole point of the project was to work with the platform. Next time I’ll try to understand the context of a project before I voice my opinion on it.
Ingo, BTW, is a good example of an open minded Microsoft developer. His response to my post was friendly and reasonable. And he’s releasing his project under the GPL.