Michael Kölling complains that Microsoft not only claims this idea as their own, but also is applying for a patent on it:

The patent claims the invention of “a facility” (the object test bench) that “receives an instantiated object, displays the instantiated object visually, receives a command from a developer relating to the instantiated object, and provides a result corresponding to the received command. As an example, the facility invokes a method provided by the instantiated object or retrieves a value of a property of the instantiated object.”

Michael at least mentions that this feature of his tool (BlueJ) was "inspired" by Smalltalk - but hey - I've got a news flash for him - the above is as good a "pocket definition" of a Smalltalk inspector as anything I've read (sure, most ST inspectors are not graphical - however, I've seen plenty of extensions going back to the early 90's that are). So let me take a moment to yell at Dan Fernandez, one of the MS people involved in this patent: Have you so much as looked at Smalltalk, ever? Maybe if you had, your team wouldn't be applying for dumb patents for ideas they didn't invent. Kind of like the MS morons I mentioned here, who apparently filed their patents relating to RSS without ever looking at various online readers, like BlogLines.

I guess MS simply believes that tons of money and scary lawyers makes them right. Sadly, they might be right - but not terribly ethical.

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