Nicely done, Microsoft!  Um, but…

With the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) subscription, you get a certain amount of Azure computing time to play with to learn how it works and develop applications.  Pretty neat stuff!

One issue was that if you accidentally used too much in terms of time/resources, you’d get billed.  Microsoft has handily solved this by imposing a spending limit of $0 on your account (see their blurb on this HERE).  If you accidentally go over your monthly freebie allotment, they shut your stuff down until next month. 

If you want to make sure your stuff never gets shut down and you are OK with getting billed, then you can remove this “spending limit”. 

However… that’s when a little Microsoft gremlin creeps out of the web page and says “once removed, the Spending Limit feature cannot be re-enabled”… um… excuse me?  Are we (well respected Microsoft software developers) to believe that it is harder to flip a bit to 1 in our account record than it is to flip it to 0?  How absurd.

If I were in charge, it wouldn’t work this way.  I would allow the user to set an arbitrary spending limit ($0 as well as anything else).  This spending limit could be set/reset by the user at any time.  Now THAT would be a very handy solution.

So, bottom line for Microsoft… A+ for the concept, C- for the execution.