aaron's weblog : Whidbey

VS 2005 Extensibility

aaronbrethorst — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 23:38:00 GMT

Look for .NET Developers Journal's June 2005 issue for an article by yours truly on Extensibility in Visual Studio 2005. You can also find the accompanying source code through my weblog here. I hasten to point out that all code samples are provided as-is with no warranty. If you're interested in retrieving the SDK for VS, take a look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/extend.

Feedback Requested: Visual Studio 2005 Tab Design Iteration 2

aaronbrethorst — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 22:41:00 GMT

I want to thank everyone for all of the terrific feedback we received on our first pair of tool window tab designs for Visual Studio 2005. As of right now, we've gotten 124 comments, which is really outstanding!

I've been working with our designer, Corrina, to modify the tab designs we showed before in response to your feedback. The general consensus we received centered around a few key points:

It was hard to tell which tab had focus based upon colors in design 1.
Tab design 2 had a "Windows 2000" appearance, as opposed to a more WinXP-inspired design.
Tab design 2 made determining the active tab a no-brainer.

So, with this in mind we'd like to get some feedback on the following matchups.

First, we will present two new tab designs (Design 3 and Design 4). Please rate these two designs in the comments just like before. Second, please compare your favorite of the two new designs to Design 2 from the last blog entry and include this information in your comment as well.

Design 3:
Please rate Design #3 on a scale of 1-7 (strongly disagree to strongly agree):
1. It is very easy to see which tab is active.
2. The tabs are aesthetically pleasing.

Design 4:
Please rate Design #4 on a scale of 1-7 (strongly disagree to strongly agree):
1. It is very easy to see which tab is active.
2. The tabs are aesthetically pleasing.

Compare the Two Groups:
Finally, of the design above that you preferred (#3 or #4), do you like it more or less than Design #2 from the previous entry?

Please let us know what you think! We'd love to get just as much feedback on this as we did before :)

Feedback Requested: Visual Studio 2005 Tab Design

aaronbrethorst — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 21:45:00 GMT

//Update 2

I have posted a new set of designs for this at http://blogs.msdn.com/aaronbrethorst/archive/2005/03/16/397107.aspx. Please leave feedback on there. Thanks! :)

//End:Update 2

//Update

Corrina, the designer I have been working with on our new tabs posted this in the comments below. I wanted to make sure that everyone saw it:

Hi, I'm one of the designers on Visual Studio and I want to throw one more question into the mix...
Design #1 allows for slightly less tab text, so truncation may occur more often with this design (imagine 3 or more tabs docked together). Would that affect your tab preference?

//End:Update

Hi everyone – The Visual Studio Design team is currently going back and forth over a few different designs for the tool window tabs in Visual Studio 2005, and we wanted to elicit feedback from the community on what all of you prefer. With the tabs in Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 it can be difficult to determine at a glance which ones are active and which are inactive, which is how we ended up with the designs that we’re prototyping.

The first design style that we’re considering is to move to overlapping tabs, so that the active tab is always visually on top of all other tabs in a group.

Please rate Design #1 on a scale of 1-7 (strongly disagree to strongly agree):
1. It is very easy to see which tab is active.
2. The tabs are aesthetically pleasing.

The second design style that we’re considering is more reminiscent of the tool window tabs in Visual Studio 2003. Inactive tabs will blend into their tool window tab channel, and only the active tab will have a tab-like appearance.

Please rate Design #2 on a scale of 1-7 (strongly disagree to strongly agree):
1. It is very easy to see which tab is active.
2. The tabs are aesthetically pleasing.

Download The New Whidbey CTP

aaronbrethorst — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 23:30:00 GMT

I just received mail that we have released the October Community Tech Preview of Visual Studio 2005. This consists of all of the variations of our Express Editions. You may want to start with the Read Me. Then, you can dive right into the apps!

Visual Studio Setup Changes

aaronbrethorst — Sat, 07 Aug 2004 01:40:00 GMT

If you've played with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1, you've probably noticed a fair number of changes to the user interface of our setup application. It's become quite a bit easier to use, but we still have some changes planned for it. I was asked by Brian Strully and Jason Lee of the Setup/Release team to elicit feedback from all of you guys on what direction you think we should take this part of Setup.

When you install Visual Studio, do you opt not to install certain languages, or do you usually confine yourself strictly to your deployment platform of Windows/Smart Devices/Web App? Do you tend to stick to the advanced installation options, or are you usually comfortable with the default settings?

Which of the three options pages shown below is the most helpful and intuitive to you? Also, please post any other comments and recommendations you may have.

Option 1:

Option 2:

Option 3:

Those Little '?' Buttons

aaronbrethorst — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 18:19:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who has logged bugs in the MSDN Product Feedback Center on inconsistencies in the use of dialog help buttons (those little '?' buttons) in Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1! I really appreciate all the help everyone has provided so far; you guys rock!

I Need Your Help

aaronbrethorst — Sun, 18 Jul 2004 06:31:00 GMT

Let me be totally straightforward and honest: I need your help. For those of you who are just tuning in, I am the Program Manager responsible for User Experience and User Interface Consistency for Visual Studio.

Visual Studio 2005 is becoming consistent with Office 2003 in how we display our help buttons. We are moving them from within dialogs to their window's title bar (check out the Display control panel for an easy-to-find example of this).

According to our specs, the expected behavior should be that clicking on the '?' button in window title bars will launch F1 help immediately. Unfortunately, we still have a ton of bugs where clicking this button gives you a “What's This” cursor (this is a cursor with a little question mark attached to it).

Here's what I need you to do. If you see a dialog anywhere in Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 (Express or otherwise) where a dialog still has an old-fashioned help button, or where the dialog's help button gives you a “What's This” cursor I need you to log a bug against it in the MSDN Product Feedback Center. Your assistance will be invaluable in making sure that Visual Studio 2005 is our best-looking, most-consistent developer tool suite ever.

I look at every single bug that comes in from the MSDN Product Feedback Center in order to correctly tag our user experience bugs, so I will definitely see every one of these that you log.

Thanks again to everyone who has logged user experience bugs against Visual Studio! You have my eternal gratitude!

Review Time

aaronbrethorst — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 08:53:00 GMT

I finally just finished writing my annual performance review. I've been working on this thing for the past few days in fits and spurts, but I really needed to have it done for my meeting with my Lead Program Manager, Jason, later this morning. In other news, I spent 4 or 5 hours today logging bugs against all of the applications we ship that don't have ComCtl 6 manifest files attached to them. Although I've been working on Windows XP theme support for a good long while now, it still amazes me how much better an application on Windows can look after ComCtl 6 gets used. There was a very painful incongruous feeling to working in the now-quite-lovely DevEnv application, and then firing up the Guid generator. I'm happy to report that every .exe we ship in a Visual Studio box should look themed under Windows XP by the time we release the application. This is a major step in the right direction for us. We certainly aren't done yet, though; I just discovered another batch of unthemed controls buried in Tools.Options today. I've committed myself to several major projects in FY2005. One fun thing that I will do is publish a content management system I developed for the Developer Division UI Guidelines website as ASP.Net 2.0 sample code. It will need to be ported to 2.0, cleaned up, and have some more features added, but that's all part of the fun for me :-). Another commitment I'm making for this year is to publish articles on WinForms UI layout for MSDN. I don't feel like there's nearly enough content on this sort of thing out there today, and I'd really like to rectify this. Heck, the Windows Ux Guidelines don't even *touch* pixels today! Anyway, that's enough from me for the time being. I need to be up in six hours to keep making cool software. I'll be posting more soon, and I will still cover the topics I promised I'd cover before. (p.s. to james lau - .text works fine under Safari on Panther for me, I think it's just your computer)

Good Tidings from VSCore Land

aaronbrethorst — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 21:18:00 GMT

I've been really bad about posting for the past few weeks due to a huge number of deadlines. I want to apologize for being so bad about maintaining this weblog lately. I will be adding more consistency content over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that. On another note, the VS Core editor team has started a group blog. One of my favorite people in the whole wide world posted on it recently. I highly recommend reading their blog, you'll pick up some cool stuff from there.

So what has Aaron been up to lately:
I have been heads-down on tracking down user interface consistency issues throughout Visual Studio. We're doing a ton of work to make Visual Studio a terrific-looking application, and this has been consuming a phenomenal amount of time lately. For example, I spent all of last Friday running through a series of common usage scenarios for our product. I am going to follow up on this in the near future with more information about the scenario testing that we've been doing. On a lighter note, I spent last weekend in California since my better half was graduating from college (I even got a bit of a tan).

You can look for blog posts on the following topics soon:

PSS issues that get handled by DevDiv (aka Days To Solution)
The Real Users Every Day program, where we have given a few of our customers copies of Whidbey to work with, and then check in with them on a weekly basis to get their feedback.
User scenario testing in VSCore.
More Windows UI consistency tips and tricks.

A follow-up on Chad's request

aaronbrethorst — Sun, 16 May 2004 00:28:00 GMT

As a follow-up to Chad Royal's request for a picture and bio of Visual Studio users, I want to conduct my own little experiment here too.

If you don't use Visual Studio today, let me know. I want to know more about who you are, why you don't use Visual Studio, and why you prefer your current set of development tools to VS. You see, I want to do everything I can to make Whidbey the best development suite out there, but the term “best“ can be really subjective. I mean, who will it be best for, exactly? I want to do everything I can to make Visual Studio the development platform that you feel is best.

I'd love to hear more about what you hate about Visual Studio, and what you love about your IDE or toolchain. What can we do to make Visual Studio more compelling to you personally? Please let me know.

Thanks!

Chad wants to get to know you better

aaronbrethorst — Sun, 16 May 2004 00:19:00 GMT

Chad Royal, one of the Lead Program Managers on my team (and an all-around terrific guy), wants to get to know you better. As he put it, “So tell me who you are and what you do with VS. Send me a picture. I'll print your picture, write your name on it, and write down a word or two about what you do with my product. I'll put your picture up in our hallway and help everyone on my team remember you're out there, depending on us to build a great VS!”

Thanks in advance to everyone who helps us out with this, we really do appreciate it a lot :-).

Another VSCore Blogger

aaronbrethorst — Sat, 20 Mar 2004 21:39:00 GMT

I just discovered that Scott Swanson, another Program Manager on VSCore, has started blogging. Scott manages the Help experience in Whidbey: everytime you hit F1 in Visual Studio, you're seeing some of the fruits of his labor. He's a great guy, well worth reading, and is a crack shot with a paintball marker (Scott got a great shot in on my ribs yesterday... ouch!).

Where's the Whidbey Content?

aaronbrethorst — Tue, 09 Mar 2004 01:41:00 GMT

Since I just started in the Visual Studio Core team in November 2003, I unfortunately haven't done that much work yet that has been released to the public. As we get closer to certain events (say, like Beta 1) I will start focusing more on Whidbey, and all of the cool stuff we've been doing there. I will be talking about Whidbey, I just really can't yet :-). Thanks for your patience.

VSIP Partner Summit

aaronbrethorst — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 05:37:00 GMT

I just got to have dinner with a ton of our VSIP Partners in Bellevue this evening. To everyone I talked to tonight: thanks a lot for telling me about what you've been up to, and for offering your thoughts on what we can do better (and for those of you who have yet to, please do. I'd love to hear what we can improve). I got some great feedback on UI Consistency across Whidbey (one of the primary areas I work on), frustrating accessibility bugs, and usability as it relates to performance. Thanks again, everyone! It was a pleasure to meet all of you :-).

Alex Kipman on MSBuild

aaronbrethorst — Fri, 23 Jan 2004 04:27:00 GMT

My occasional lunch companion/soon-to-be office mate, Alex Kipman, is featured on the latest episode of MSDN TV. You can check it out here. Kipman talks extensively here about our new build platform, MSBuild, and what makes it so cool.

Random sidenote: I went to the blog meetup the other night, where I was asked “what's your favorite feature in Whidbey, and don't say refactoring!” I have to say, I was kind of stumped for a second. My natural reaction would have been to say “refactoring,” just because it is so incredibly handy, cool, and useful. Nevertheless, after a couple seconds of thinking about Whidbey, it was clear: MSBuild is just about the coolest new feature of Whidbey. It's been very low on the hype radar thus far, but I think, in time, it will prove itself to be a valuable asset for any .Net-using development group.