Beta 3 Wraps

I just finished the coding cycle for VisualBlogger 2004 Beta 3. I posted some screenshots a few days ago, and I'm getting ready to post a few more soon. The goal of this cycle was to make the UI more usable while not intruducing any functionality regressions. This entailed several goals:

• Changing the main interface to a stand-alone MDI design.
• Make the whole UI accessible via keyboard.
• Bringing the forms inline with standard Windows design practices.
• Rewriting the internals to streamline how the UI interacts with the Entry objects.
• Fix the saving process to work more like Microsoft Word.
• Redesign the Blog Configuration form to be more intuitive.
• Finalize the Provider Model design to allow provider properties to be declared along with the providers themselves.
• Redesign the Options dialog to be able to handle more settings.
• Add proxy support to all blog providers.

That work has been completed, and I very much like where it's at. In addition to having the most formatting options, VisualBlogger is now the only blog tool to support editing multiple entries at once. To that end, the next build will have some other features to enhance this capability. You should also see performance slightly improved, as it is now only loading forms as it needs them.

Earlier, Matt lamented that VisualBlogger was moving away from it's Visual Studio .NET add-in roots. Fear not, this is just one of several ways the tool will manifest itself. The UI that was in previous build will still be the UI that's used in application-hosted scenarios. All of the other UI enhancements will remain, but we have to make certain usability sacrifices to work in the cramped spaces of the IDE. More on that later.

All I have left in this revision is to basically rewrite the whole User's Guide. Gonna try to wrap that up in the next day or so, for a launch very soon. This guide should not be as long as the last one, because most of the work configuring each blog engine has been done for you.

Well, that's it for me this evening. Oh wait, it's morning. Oh well. Off to bed for me. I guess I should leave you a screenshot. Is it sad that this is how I spend my weekends? Wait, don't answer that.