(OK, I’m sure it wasn’t imitation, but…)
Recently Microsoft has started branching out and publishing various frameworks (in coordination with new releases of their development platform) that can be used to construct applications on top of their technology (similar to what has been popular for a while now in the Java world, but in this case, the .NET platform).
Interestingly, while looking into some of the more recent stuff I stumbled upon one particular implementation that looked very familiar - because it was extremely similar to the underlying framework that we’ve built for the main project I’ve been working on for a couple years. Even down to the names of the various internal components, etc. Unfortunately, I can’t go into any more detail than that about it publicly, but suffice it to say I was a bit surprised.
At the end of the day, I take it as a good validation of the design we came up with, because at the time there were some questions about it since there didn’t seem to be anything else out there like it. Sometimes in software development that means that you are either on to something good that no one else has thought of yet, but much more frequently it’s an indication that there’s probably something wrong with the way you’re thinking about doing it, and there’s a reason no one else has done it that way already. It feels good to see things emerging now that seem to indicate that it was the former rather than the latter in this case.