The JPK Experience

This is partially a test post so I can play with commenting options, but it's also a serious question, what do people think about the ability to require people to have a login before commenting?  Is it a sign that the author is trying to dodge questions that users may not feel comfortable leaving under their own name, or is it just one of the easiest ways to avoid comment spam?

 Let me know your thoughts (and you'll have to be non-anonymous to do so!)

 

-Jeremy

Wow what a ride the last couple days have been.  As many of you probably noticed we've had some problems with the MSDN blogs being available.  Last night we did some emergency maintenance and although problems continued into today we seem to be holding okay now.

We are well aware of just how important the blogs hosted at MSDN are to people.  Both inside Microsoft for people wanting to get information out, and outside for people who need the valuable resources we host.  Our performance problems have been unfortunate and we are working to improve the situation for the future.

As always, thanks for your continued patience.

-Jeremy Kelley

 

This is a post to test out some blog capabilities...

This past week we migrated around 50 more forums from the old forums platform to our new one.  I'd like to take a moment to welcome all new users to the site, and say that if you have any questions feel free to ask me!

For moderators that are moving over, you may have lost your permissions in the move.  If that's the case you'll need to send me your forums display name and which forums you want to moderate in.  One of the features of the new forums is the ability to assign moderators to particular areas, so let me know where you want to moderate and we'll get you all set up.

-Jeremy

Here at Microsoft we like to talk a lot about "ownership" of things.  I myself can be either "business owner" or "community owner" of the MSDN Forums depending on the time of day and which way the wind is blowing.

Do I really own the forums?  Well not exactly, I don't sit on the platform team, so I don't own the development of the forums.  I don't sit in operations, so I don't own the servers.  I kind of own the community itself, but what does that mean?

Basically "ownership" is a way of assigning accountability.  I am accountable for doing what I can to make sure that the MSDN Forums are healthy, that its users are taken care of, and that the product groups that represent the technologies we have forums for are actively participating in them.  The image I like to think of is me as some sort of virtual "Colossus of Rhodes" with my feet bridging the gap between product groups at Microsoft and the user base out there in the rest of the world.  I need to represent each of those groups to the other one to make sure that we're forming a sort of contract around our responsibilities in our little community and that we're all happy with the results.  Sometimes I do a better job than others.

So that's how I "own" the MSDN Forums as a whole, but what does it mean to have an owner of a single forum?  It may surprise you to find out that we do in fact try to have a single individual responsible for each MSDN forum.  The forum owners may not be outwardly visible to the community they are responsible for, but they have an important role.  A forum owner is on the hook for ensuring that their team is supporting their forum the best it can.  They are also responsible for trying to engage the community and get people excited about their forum.

The thing to remember with all of this, is that the forums are an ecosystem, there are a lot of different involved parties, from us here at Microsoft, to you the users.  And the forums only function when there's balance in the community, overall, I think we do a decent job with balance.  Certainly there are areas we can improve, and I hope you'll tell me if there are ones I may not be seeing.  But in the spirit of community, it's definitely true that you all own the forums as much as I do.

After a long week of deployments, patching, migrating of some 600,000+ posts, and more patching, we've finally begun the move off of our old MSDN Forums platform, and onto the new one.

Last week we moved over the following groups of forums:

• .NET Development
• Visual Studio
• Visual Basic
• Visual C#
• Visual C++

We've enabled re-direction from the old forums, so if you have a link to one of the forums, or to a post in one of those forums, you'll be automatically sent to the new site after the obligatory "you're being redirected" page appears.

There are a lot of new features on the forums that I'll get into over time, but I want to call out one of my favorites right off the bat.

When you're browsing the list of threads in a forum you'll see a little arrow between the thread title and the icon indicating the thread type (see the area marked with the red rectangle).

If you click on that arrow you'll see the the thread previewed without reloading the page, like this:

Right now all you can do from the preview is read the thread and see what post is marked as the answer, but in future updates to the forums you'll see more functionality appear here.

To me, that feature helps eliminate one of the frequent complaints about web forums, that loading the various pages, and navigating through threads, takes up valuable time and can be very slow.  Now, if you're looking for the answer to a question someone else asked, or are just browsing around looking for interesting topics, you can do so without navigating away from your thread list!  Combine that with the filters at the top of the page, and finding posts that you're interested in has never been easier on our site.

Enjoy the new forums, and stay tuned for more discussions about new features and other forums related topics.

I'm starting to shovel some coal into the engine of the Microsoft Forums Client project.  As of this morning you can find my rough draft requirements for the project at the CodePlex site for the project.  I've spent a pretty long time working on the requirements, I know the document itself has some areas that need to be cleaned up and fleshed out, but I believe I've got a pretty solid list of everything a great offline client should have.

What are the next steps?  From here I hope everyone reading will go check out the requirements document and leave your feedback.  Very soon we will be turning those requirements into individual feature items in the project issue tracker for everyone to vote on.  Once we get a good, prioritized, list of features the coding can begin!

Keep in mind that just because a feature shows up in the requirements doesn't mean it's going to make it into release one.  We think it's important to get something with basic functionality, and solid stability, out as fast as we can.  That doesn't mean we' won't try to do as many features as we can, it just means that some things may have to wait for release 2 or release 3.  I also think that given the nature of the project, we'll be able to keep making releases over time, even after the core team is also working on other things.

I'm really excited about this project.  I've spent this week talking to a lot of people at the Microsoft MVP Summit about forms in general and the client app in particular.  I've heard a lot of passionate voices around these things and I'll try and post a good recap of the week once I get through tomorrow.

For anyone who's at the Summit, I'll be at the Communities side session from 2:00 - 5:30 or so on Thursday, May 16, 2008.

Technorati Profile

What I've been up to...

Over the last six months or so I've ended up becoming the community business owner for the MSDN Forums.  What does that mean exactly?  Well it's hard to say.  Basically I stand in between Microsoft and all of our community members on the forums to represent both sides. 

Internally it's my job to make sure that the team responsible for making and supporting the forums has the voice of the MSDN customer.  I also go around to teams at Microsoft and talk to them about how they can improve their forums, whether it's spending more time on them, or changing the way they interact with people on them.

Externally, it's my job to help establish moderator guidelines, and work with the moderators when issues need to be resolved (they can tell you whether I'm any good at that last part).

The new project...

One of the issues that I've heard from a lot of different sources is the need for a tool that would let people read the forums offline, and compose responses when they don't have an Internet connection. 

Several projects like this have been attempted before, each meeting with varied amounts of success.  We're going to add another one to the list.

Why this one will work...

This time around we've got a couple things going for us to enable our success on this project. 

First, the forums team is supportive of the project.  We've talked with them about it, and we're keeping close ties to make sure they know what we're doing and so we can get help if we need it. 

Second, since the team has just released a new platform (check it out here) they're really focused on making it a success.  To the point that providing an API that we can work with has been a high priority.  The API isn't publicly accessible quite yet, but it should be soon.

How can you help...

We've started up a project on CodePlex where we'll be doing all of our work.  So far the scope document is published, so feel free to head over and give us some feedback on it.

The first question we need to answer is whether to build a standalone app or a plugin for something else.  I'd love any suggestions you have.  Especially since this tool is all for you my loyal readers!  If we don't build the right tool then we haven't done our job.

As we go along there will be plenty more opportunities to provide input on the design and requirements, as well as helping us actually build it if you're that way inclined!

I'm really excited about this project, so I hope we can make it rock.  With your help as always.

-Jeremy Kelley

It's not often that multiple of your favorite things come together in one big ball of awesome.  But just recently that's happened for me.  As part of the Heroes Happen Here campaign there's a cool new webcomic.  The comic has a really cool tech theme that should unveil over the coming days and weeks.  There are professional comic writers and artists doing the creative side, with a lot of input from geeks on how things should work, and how to keep it as real as possible.  I've been lucky enough to participate in a small way on this and I'm really excited to see it public so you can enjoy it as well.

I'm going to try and not let this blog go for close to an entire year without posting this time.  I've come back to the blog to kick off what I hope is going to be a really exciting first half of 2008.  The first big thing to announce (or at least talk about since Soma already announced it) is the launch of the MSDN Code Gallery.

MSDN Code Gallery is our new code and sample sharing site.  Your first question is probably "How is this different from CodePlex and why should I care about another sharing site?"  That's a very good question, and one that I hope I have a satisfactory answer for.  CodePlex is a great place for doing collaborative or community development for Open Source projects, using a TFS backend.  What CodePlex doesn't really target is the simple sharing scenario.  You've created a code sample and you want to share it with people quickly and easily.  That's where Code Gallery steps in.  Code Gallery removes the source control system from CodePlex, and makes optional some of the pieces that you might normally use for your project management.  Sure, if you want the issue tracker to let people log bugs on your samples you can have it, but for most simple scenarios you can just post your code, edit your wiki and be on your way.

We worked with the CodePlex team to try and make Code Gallery as easy to use as we could so that it would be a good successor for the GotDotNet user samples.  If you have suggestions for improvement, or need some help getting a resource page up and running you can contact us at codeglry -A-T- microsoft.com.  I hope you find some good resources on Code Gallery, and if you've got your own samples you want to release, post 'em up!

-Jeremy

This is a little experiment to see what happens when we try and date a blog post way back in time...

As part of making the transition from Beta to full Release status, we wanted to make sure that the Pack Installer was fitting in well with Visual Studio 2005 and other tools published by Microsoft. We really wanted to make sure that even if we weren't the flashiest UI around, we had a bit of polish that made it seem "designed" rather than "put together." To help accomplish that goal we took the Pack Installer through a semi-formal design review with some of the UX designers here in Developer Division.

This was the first time that we'd taken a Power Toy project through a UX review and I don't think either we, or the designers really knew what to expect. Their first reaction was "it's not as bad as I thought it would be." Which considering that I'm not a UX designer was about as much as I could have hoped for. The result of that meeting was a lot of great feedback on how to improve the Pack Installer User Experience. I'm going to walk through screen by screen to point out the little details that have been changed that, together, make what I think is a dramatic improvement.

Detecting Visual Studio

When Pack Installer first starts up you get a warning if Visual Studio is running. In Beta 2 of Pack Installer here's what you saw:

Obviously this dialog has some problems. By using the standard "MessageBox" to display information, I created a completely non-actionable dialog. There's nothing on this screen that can actually help the user to shut down Visual Studio. I hate it when other applications give me these kinds of messages, so I should have been much more aware that I was doing it myself. Here's the new and improved dialog:

You can see immediately that this dialog is much better. The icon on the left gives you an indication that the information conveyed isn't dangerous, it's informational. And the buttons along the bottom give you the choice of what you want to do, and are very clear about what will happen when you select them.

The Main Window

Here's what the Beta 2 UI looked like:

From a UX standpoint there are a bunch of things wrong with this dialog, and not all of them are visible. At the very top, the Tool Selection label really isn't serving any purpose; it's just kind of there. On the left side we have the Refresh List button, which is big, and has the only icon of all the buttons. Obviously the point of the application is not to "Refresh" the "List" over and over again, so that should be much less prominent. And the whole top band in general is just too tall, with too much wasted space.

As we move down the screen we can find more problems. The main list doesn't make very effective use of the horizontal space, and the "+/-", indicator on the left is really ugly for expanding descriptions. It would be much better if we could show a portion of the description all the time, and then expand it to show the whole thing. In the tagging and filtering area, there wasn't enough feedback being given as you moved the mouse over the tags.

So after all that, here's what the screen looks like now:

We now have better use of space, and the whole thing flows a lot better. Next to the "All" tag you can see the indicator that gets drawn when a tag is selected, a similar one is drawn when you hover.

The License Terms Window

Overall we're really happy with how the License Terms window came out. There were some small things we could do to make a difference though. The top area and bottom area don't have the same border styles. The suggested look is flat, so the bottom area already looks out of date. In addition all of the text should align at the left so it looks right (correct). The grid in the middle also needs to have its columns properly aligned. Finally, what may seem the smallest, but was one of the more frustrating things to fix, the text at the bottom uses *'s for emphasis around the word "each." The * character is not a proper formatting indicator in normal publishing. So it needed to be bolded.

Here's the original screen:

And the subtly changed, but greatly improved new screen:

 Installation Progress Window

The main problem with this window was the amount of space it was taking up. The advertising to the right was huge, especially compared to the content. Even worse, the advertising was just taking up horizontal space and not vertical. Reformatting the advertising graphic makes the window much more tolerable. The installation complete message was also not especially prominent on the screen. Relocating that to its own area where the download progress bar used to be makes it much easier to see. That, along with blinking the toolbar, helps you know when things are done installing so you can tab away, and not wonder when it's done.

Original screen:

1.0 Release screen:

I (and others that I've talked to) think the changes we made were a significant improvement over what we released at Beta 2. There are lots of other little changes that I didn't call out that would be hard to visualize here, for instance making sure all windows pop up in the center of the screen by default. Working with the UX designers was great, and I'd encourage anyone who has an opportunity to work with one, to do so; they can make a big difference in the experience your users have with your application.

I'm happy to announce that Pack Installer 1.0 is now ready to go! The changes from Beta 2 to 1.0 have not been huge, but there are some improvements I'd like to call out.

• Tool descriptions are no longer truncated to 256 characters. In addition to getting a preview of the description all the time, you can expand the description to see the whole thing, not just the first chunk of it.
• Files are now verified to be the correct download before running an installation. Using the MD5 hash of the files we target for download, the Pack Installer checks to see if the file received is the one specified in the feed file. This way you can be sure what you're installing is what you asked for.
• The Specification and Test Plan are included in the source code. If you're curious about what the spec for Pack Installer looks like, it is now located in the "docs" subfolder in the source tree.

 

Over on CodePlex I've just released Beta 2 of our Pack Installer project.  This release has seen a lot of hard work go into it, especially by our primary developer Bertan Aygun.  New features that we've added include tags on each of the tools in the list and the ability to filter by those tags, search, and support for VSI based content.  I'm really excited about releasing this new version of the tool, the last Beta got over 9000 downloads!

 Beta 2 also comes with an update to the feed file to add some new content.  Since we had to update the schema file you'll need to download the new Beta in order to see further updates to the feed, but the existing Beta should continue to work just fine.

 Updates in the feed file:

• 101 Samples Packs - These packs of samples for C# and VB contain a ton of sample code that any developer should find useful.
• Visual C# 2005 Code Snippets - Visual Basic 2005 shipped with a lot of snippets in the box for all sorts of things, this pack lets you get C# up to the same level.
• ILMerge 2.07.0112 - In Mike's own words about the release:

"This release contains some bug fixes related to marking merged assemblies as retargetable, which may fix some problems people are experiencing when trying to execute merged assemblies on the Compact Framework. If that has been an issue for you, then please try this new release and let me know if you still have a problem. (Compliments on it working are also acceptable…)"

Happy downloading!

 

 Here's a screenshot of the UI for Pack Installer Beta 2: