Jason Tucker's Blog

not at all creative...

Whidbey or new Office?

ALA Scoble's post on commenting on Longhorn, I've decided to make a comment on Whidbey:

The good news is that the story in Whidbey gets much, much better.  Here is a sneak peak screenshot of it in action (note that it is a big screenshot -- so you want to open the picture separately to avoid the browser shrinking the picture and making it unreadable).

First, what the hell is up with MSN style tabs and the Office 2k3 UI? Not that I don't like the Office 2k3 look, but this is my IDE and I want my IDE to be useful, not pretty. Now of course MS would not sacrfice usability for style but how much extra time was spent around a conference table talking about how the tabs will look when it could have been used talking about something else?

Next I'm not quite sure how I feel about the Web designer not connecting to a web server and going straight to a directory (i.e. C:\Websites). Hopefully there will be a way to switch between the two. This is a minor issue and it's probably just do too habit ( VI --> VS.Net 2002 --> VS.Net 2003 ) on my part. Monday can't come soon enough.

.:: currently rockin' out to: Force Of Gravity - BT (8:19) ::.
Posted: Oct 23 2003, 10:09 AM by jtucker | with 1 comment(s)
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Comments

scottgu@microsoft.com said:

Don't worry -- we pick up the new Office UI for free because VS uses the MSO.dll component for UI. We didn't spend a lot of time sitting around the table trying to make it look prettier.. ;-)

Not sure I fully understand your second question: "not quite sure how I feel about the Web designer not connecting to a web server and going straight to a directory (i.e. C:\Websites)."

Whidbey supports going both directly to a web-server (and editing live there), as well as developing on a local server and pushing the change up to the machine. It is up to the developer/team to pick which approach they prefer. Our experience has been that depending on the situation/people, the preference can be different. With Whidbey we now fully enable both.

Hope this helps,

Scott
# October 23, 2003 3:39 PM