This is not the first time I have called out CNET's bluff, and it won't be the last.

I was mildly tickled to read this claim by a budding CNET journalist (?!).

Matt Assay, seems to indicate that users are going to find themselves in a really bad place a few years down the road, because they would put all their content inside SharePoint, and thus be locked into SharePoint, because apparently, there is no way to get content out of SharePoint.

Quoted -

"But if Microsoft really wants to do its customers a favor, it will open up its repository to make it as easy to get content out of the repository as it is to get it into the repository."

So I guess, if I was a Microsoft SharePoint customer, I should be darned scared .. because I am putting all my files into this blackhole, and I have no way of getting them out, right? Oh my! Hailstorm all over again.

Well, heck I'll do Microsoft's customers a favor. Here are 3 lines of code that lets you pull a file out of SharePoint. 

   1:  using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteURL))

   2:  {

   3:      SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb();

   4:      SPDocumentLibrary dox = web.Lists["Documents"] as SPDocumentLibrary;

   5:      byte[] fileBytes = dox.Items[0].File.OpenBinary();

   6:  }

Now that wasn't so hard, was it?

In fact, I would be amazed  to find any half way decent SharePoint developer, who would argue that the above code is too complex to handle.

So the real question is, can you trust CNET's judgment and bias against Microsoft?

I never have, but it is still amusing. So is Woody Molly.

Added Later: There is a tiny disclaimer at the bottom, that Matt Assay works for a competitor of SharePoint called Alfresco. I guess I am not surprised to see his bias - even though what he is claiming is 200% pure lies. But should CNET really encourage such lies on it's website? Does a disclaimer free them of any moral obligations? What do you think!?