Connect 2.3 Alpha 2
Hi folks- we've just completed deployment of the latest Connect 2.3 bits to http://connectbeta.microsoft.com. Please take a look and see what you think. There are a few changes you may find nice, but keep in mind that this is VERY early in the process, so much of what you're seeing will change or be enhanced by the time we go live with it. So don't think that anything is cast in stone, especially with respect to some of the AJAX stuff on the Feedback page.
If you find any bugs or have any suggestions, please file them at http://connect.microsoft.com/Connect/feedback (the main site, as feedback filed on the beta site doesn't go anywhere). We appreciate and listen to all your feedback, bug reports and suggestions.
In fact, I have almost 100 bugs, suggestions, feature requests, and other items on my plate, many of which are directly from you folks. So keep them coming.
AJAX and ConnectBeta
Here's what I can tell you about the AJAX support on ConnectBeta: It's in the early stages yet. Keep in mind that much of what we're doing right now is validating that AJAX works properly, establishing what we can accomplish given our site's architecture and target browser requirements. So much of what you'll see isn't as nice looking as we'll have it. You're looking at what is essentially proof of concept stuff in some cases, experimental in others. We elected to go forward with some unpolished stuff, and in a couple of cases, very unpolished, so you'd have an opportunity to get a glimpse of what we're up to.
Here's the (probably not all-inclusive) list of items I know about for AJAX in Connect:
- The summary panels appear over the other content and block it until it has faded out, which kind of sucks. This is going to change significantly; modifcations to the location and appearance of the summary panel as well as changes to the way it pops up are in the works. This was mostly to demonstrate different ways of showing the summary data, and was never going to be the final look.
- Adding or removing items from your watchlist using the summary display will only update your watchlist if there's already items in it. If you run into this, simply refresh the page to see your new watchlist contents, but if you have items in your watchlist it should work.
- Adding or removing items from your watchlist can cause the page layout to reflow if the list becomes long or short.
- The "add/remove from watchlist" option on the summary control appears whether you're signed in or not, but if you're not signed in, just shows a pipe (|) character.
- Fadein/fadeout isn't consistent all the time. Sometimes a panel will be left floating.
- Hovering over a feedback link on the overview page can cause the page layout to flow differently, but the panel remains in its original location.
- When you "rate" an item by selecting a particular star, it may take a moment to commit your rating, and until it does moving the mouse away causes it to go back to the previous state, and then it will update. This will be corrected by "locking" the item to the selected rating until the rating selection is committed.
As you can see, the current state is pretty early in the process. Over the next few weeks I'll be working on a number of things to improve this experience, and I think you'll be very pleased. The rest of the dev team is very excited about what AJAX brings to the table.
