Microsoft Fakes Bait and Switch?

Is it possible Microsoft tricked developers into adopting their code isolation framework in an attempt to force upgrades to the Ultimate version of Visual Studio 2012?

When I first learned about the Moles framework from Microsoft Research, I was excited at the possibilities for unit testing and began presenting it at user groups and conferences. I was even more excited after Microsoft announced that a new version of this framework, named Fakes, would be included with Visual Studio 11 (now 2012).

Microsoft's documentation originally indicated that Fakes would be included with both Premium and Ultimate, but early adopters noticed the VS2012 Premium release candidate did not include Fakes and the documentation was later updated to indicate it would only ship with Ultimate.

Meanwhile, Moles is no longer supported in VS2012. So where does this leave those who adopted Moles and use the Premium version of Visual Studio? It appears they will be forced to upgrade to Ultimate or abandon the use of Microsoft's code isolation framework.

I choose to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure the original intention was to ship Fakes with the same versions as were previously compatible with Moles. Discontinuing Moles made sense when a new-and-improved framework was slated to take it's place. The decision to restrict the use of Fakes to Ultimate was surely made without considering the ramifications to their existing customers.

The question remains of what, if anything, Microsoft will do to address the needs of those customers that have been left out in the cold.

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