The JPK Experience : Pack Installer

Working with User Experience designers to improve Pack Installer 1.0

JeremyKelley — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 01:33:00 GMT

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.

Pack Installer 1.0 Released!

JeremyKelley — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:38:00 GMT

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.

Pack Installer Beta 2 Released and Feed Update for 1/18/2007

JeremyKelley — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 04:17:00 GMT

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:

Pack Installer Feed Update for January 10, 2007

JeremyKelley — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 07:39:00 GMT

This week's update brings a brand new tool to the Pack Installer! The Visual Basic team has released a new Power Pack called the Microsoft Printer Compatibility Library. In their own words:

"The Microsoft Visual Basic Printer Compatibility Library allows projects that used the Printer and Printers Collection in Visual Basic 6.0 to be upgraded without having to re-write your printing logic. By simply adding a reference to the library, declaring a Printer and making a few minor syntax changes, your project will be able to print using the Printers collection and Printer object as it did in Visual Basic 6.0."

So if this sounds like it will fill a hole you have in your development right now, or even if it just sounds like fun and you want to get your old school VB'ing on, boot up the Pack Installer and install away!

Note: I realize I just updated the feed at the end of last week, but I'm going to try real hard to keep to a weekly Wednesday release cadence for updates. Stay tuned for more tools!

Pack Installer Feed Update

JeremyKelley — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 03:09:00 GMT

The list of tools included by the Pack Installer has been updated this week to include some cool new updates to some popular tools. Now included are:

ILMerge 2.0.7.0102, this is an update from the 2.0.6 release
XML Notepad 2007, this is an updated version of the XML Notepad 2006 utility. This includes a couple of new features as well as a nice list of bug fixes. More details can be found here.
Resource Refactoring Tool Beta, moving up from our previous Alpha release, the Beta is a good step towards having a full 1.0 release.
TFS Administration Tool 1.2, this updated release includes the ability to administer TFS installations configured to use only SSL.

Source code released for Pack Installer on CodePlex

JeremyKelley — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 03:12:00 GMT

Despite taking me a lot longer than I anticipated, the source code for the Beta version of Pack Installer is now available on the CodePlex site. This lets us finally start to do what we've wanted to with this tool, which is collaborative development. So if you're interested in helping out, or just want to see how it works, head on over to CodePlex!

Problems reported with Pack Installer, I may have the answer

JeremyKelley — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 21:52:00 GMT

I've been getting reports from multiple sources indicating that there's a problem with the Pack Installer. The symptom seems to be an exception thrown at startup. If you see this message:

see the end of this message for details on invoking
just-in-time (JIT) debugging instead of this dialog box.

************** Exception Text **************
System.Data.ConstraintException: Failed to enable constraints. One or more rows contain values violating non-null, unique, or foreign-key constraints.
at System.Data.DataSet.FailedEnableConstraints()
at System.Data.DataSet.EnableConstraints()
at System.Data.DataSet.set_EnforceConstraints(Boolean value)
at System.Data.XmlDataLoader.LoadData(XmlReader reader)
at System.Data.DataSet.ReadXml(XmlReader reader, Boolean denyResolving)
at System.Data.DataSet.ReadXml(String fileName)
at Microsoft.VSPowerToys.PackInstaller.PackInstallerForm.LoadPackFeed()
at Microsoft.VSPowerToys.PackInstaller.PackInstallerForm.mgr_TaskCompleted(Object sender, TaskCompletedEventArgs e)

then you're getting the error. I believe the problem is that when I released the Beta of Pack Installer I broke the already released Alpha. The core technical issue is that I updated the schema for the Beta and changed the format of the feed file used to get the list of tools. Unfortunately I used the same forwarding link to point to the new file as pointed to the old one. Since the link is now updated anyone using the Alpha is broken. This was careless on my part and unfortunately all I can do at this point is apologize to anyone who tried to use the tool and had it break.

The solution to the problem should be to run the Beta version instead of the Alpha. If this problem persists, please let me know and I will look into it even further, but I am pretty sure this is the cause of the problem, at least it repro'ed on my machine this way, and I hope there isn't another bug in the software.

Thanks for your patience,

-Jeremy

One last thing!

JeremyKelley — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:54:00 GMT

I forgot to mention that there are new tools included in the listings as well!

New in the feed are:

ILMerge - This tool rocks! I actually use it when I put the release of Pack Installer together. It lets you merge assemblies together so you can have a low footprint deployment.

Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer 1.0 - A new Power Toy from our team, the shipping version comes with an ASP.NET configuration analyzer and a nifty plug-in model for enhancement.

XML Notepad 2006 - Because really, who DOESN'T need a good XML editor? I find this is very handy to have around.

Visual Basic Power Packs - 2 Packs released by the VB team to enhance your VB development experience.

Pack Installer Beta released!!!

JeremyKelley — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:46:00 GMT

On Friday I was able to get the Beta version of the Pack Installer released to CodePlex. Follow the link to get your hands on its goodness.

New features in the Beta include:

Basic sorting of the list of tools
Ability to run the uninstall of a tool from the UI
New and improved license agreement screen - This lets us be more flexible in bringing you a wider variety of tools.

As always please send me any feedback you might have on the tool. There are a few new features planned before the 1.0 release but the most important thing I can do at this point is incorporate any good feedback I get.

Oh, and for those that are interested I'll post a follow-up message when I get the source code uploaded to CodePlex.