Connect 2.3 Alpha 2

Cyclometh — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 01:50:00 GMT

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.

Connect 2.3- AJAX!

Cyclometh — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 21:59:00 GMT

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.

The Feedback Loop : AJAX

Connect 2.3 Alpha 2

Connect 2.3- AJAX!