Connect 2.3- AJAX!
The Connect team is in the middle of development on Connect version 2.3, a minor functionality release of the site targeted for late spring or early summer. We're putting an emphasis on usability and user experience in this release.
One thing I've been personally excited to work on is integrating AJAX functionality into the Connect site. We're taking a measured approach with AJAX and implementing specific features or updating existing ones to take advantage of AJAX functionality.
If you develop ASP.NET web applications, take a look a http://ajax.asp.net and get a look at the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions framework.
In Connect 2.3, the first feature to get some AJAX love is the voting system. We're changing the concept slightly- no longer voting, but "rating", which is really what it was meant to be all along.
Here's a smal picture of the new rating feature on the Feedback Details page. This takes the place of the "Voting" box at the top of the page.
To rate an item, you simply select the value you want in number of stars- from very unimportant to very important. Click the one you want and the value is instantly committed, the averages updated and you don't have to leave the page. You can also change your rating, just as you can currently change your vote.
The same functionality is available from the Feedback Overview page for any site:
Again, the same logic applies- simply select the value you want to assign an item, click it and it's immediately stored, and the average/number of ratings updated. This works on both the Feedback Overview AND the Search Results page (so you can rate multiple items without having to leave the page).
The "Vote" page is gone entirely; no longer do you have to use a separate page for a trivial action that shouldn't require so much effort.
We're also going to add the ability to add and remove items from your watchlist without navigating around or doing a full postback as is currently required. For this version, we're not AJAX-enabling a lot of features, but if time allows we'll look at adding some other nice features, like AJAX-enabling the comments feature. Validations, workarounds and so forth are all slated to get some AJAX love, but a lot depends on how things shake out.
I've also developed an AJAX-enabled "Tagging" feature, which was used to test AJAX functionality with our site during development and identify those areas we needed to address in order to integrate AJAX. The tagging feature is fun and potentially very useful- although it's not ready for prime-time, being an internal prototype, we're definitely looking at delivering a lot of this kind of stuff to improve your experience using the Connect site (REST, anyone?).
This is just what I've been working on- the rest of the Connect team is working on some pretty neat stuff too. Sadly, a lot of the work I'm doing in this release also focuses on our internal tools for managing Connect, so I can't show you some of the cool stuff there. Hey, beta administrators need love too! ;)
I'm still doing some fit and finish work on some updates to the overview page and the search results view. When I have those more stable, I'll post some larger screenshots. An alpha release is slated for sometime in the next week or two- watch this space for updates, so you can get a VERY early preview of Connect 2.3.
Oh, and all the stuff I've talked about here works in IE, Firefox and Opera.
