While recently at Microsoft to talk about Ajax security, I uncovered something, well, odd.

Caleb and I were giving a demo on reverse engineering client-side JavaScript. I showed some cool JavaScript analysis stuff and then started to show the Firefox plugin Firebug, quite possibly the best JavaScript debugger on the planet.

The reaction in the crowd was like a vampire's reaction to sunlight. A cry. A scream, and a literally moan erupted from the crowd of ASP.NET and Visual Studio designers: No! We cannot see that! Turn it off!

At first I thought this was some crappy policy about not being able to use Firefox at Microsoft or something. So I close it and move on. Later, Caleb and I needed to edit some HTML inline, so I click on Firebug's DOM inspector. The results were the same a before: Ahhhhh! Turn it off, Turn it off! The lawyers, they will kill us!

As near as I could piece together afterwards, these developers were absolutely forbidden by Microsoft's legal department from looking at Firebug, for fear of inadvertent infringement. They aren't allowed to see the feature set, the implementation, or the UI. Which of course can mean only one thing. The VS and ASP.NET guys are working on some kind of JavaScript debugger.