No, this isn't a new sample application, it is the first of (what I hope are) many blog posts by me, Chris Deluca. I am the dev lead for the Subscriptions development team. Our most recent release involved quite a few significant architectural changes and I've been closely following the blog posts. I have also been wanting to create a more direct route of contact between you (my customers) and me, and figured that, with some of the recent feedback posts that have been critical of our new functionality, now was as good a time as any.
My goal with these blog posts is to accomplish the following:
1. Provide a more direct touch point between me (and my team) and you
2. Solicit your feedback about our features through the use of quick to answer surveys
3. Let you know about upcoming feature additions and changes to our existing functionality
My requests of you:
1. Feel free to provide constructive criticism about any feature that is available on our web site or that I discuss as a part of this blog. My definition of constructive criticism is that in addition to stating why you dislike the way something works, please provide what your suggestion would be to make it better. For example, “…I don’t like the new navigation UI…” isn’t informative enough, whereas “…I don’t like the new navigation UI and would prefer a simple list of products arranged in an alphabetical order…” allows us to make note of an alternate navigation UI that we can take under consideration.
2. Please let us know when you like something. I realize most people are highly motivated to post comments when they get riled – we sure would like to know when we’ve done something right too! :)
3. Participate in our surveys early and often. I plan to ask questions regularly and I would love your feedback. On each survey, I plan to ask a couple questions that can be answered in just a minute or two – the more responses we get, the better!
So now on to a couple of quick responses to posts I’ve seen on the blog recently…
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It wasn’t broken, so why did you “fix” it? |
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The functionality of our web site could have been divided into two broad categories: The part of the web site that our team designed, coded and maintained and the part of the web site that was designed, coded and maintained by another team here at Microsoft (but not in our group). This dual ownership caused issues – for example, whenever we wanted to make a change, no matter how minor, we were forced to queue up with all of the other work the other team was responsible for. The other team did a good job over the last few years, but we wanted to innovate at a much quicker pace. So, we embarked on a complete rewrite of the download UI functionality. What we have delivered so far is just the beginning of the full feature set we plan to deliver in the coming months. There were many features we had to cut to make our deployment dates, but we will be adding some of the cut features back in, as well as adding many new features we hope you will really enjoy. |
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Please, for all that is right and good in this universe, can’t you please bring back the old UI? |
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In a word, no. Our development platform is much different than the platform the other team utilized – ours is hosted on a completely virtual web site solution that also manages all of the content of the MSDN and TechNet web sites. The nice thing about the architectural changes is now that we own the entire code stack, we can make changes at a much faster pace as well as offering more features in the long run. |
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Ok, you won’t bring back the old site, but I’m really not crazy about the new navigational control – I especially hate flyouts! |
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It is very clear that one navigational style doesn’t work for everyone. Some people like to utilize search to find products, some people love tree-control navigation and some like simple lists – and some people do like flyouts. Our plan is to offer several different types of navigation and allow you to choose one as your “preferred” navigational mechanism. Using this approach, we think we can make just about everyone happy – as you’ll get to pick the one that meets your needs best. |
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Where did all of the personalization features go? |
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Personalization of the site was one of the features cut to make our delivery dates. We will be adding personalization features back soon. |
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You really messed up the organization of the data. I can’t find anything! |
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This is one comment that surprises me. I admit that once you get used to finding things in a particular location, figuring out the new location can be painful. Our goal was to put downloads together in a much easier to find style. Files for Vista – including all service packs – where are they? They are all together (surprisingly enough) under Vista . I want the SDK for Windows Server 2008 – where is it? Right next to the actual Windows Server 2008 download. I will be doing a survey shortly to probe this topic in more depth. |
Well, I think that is all for now. There are a lot of changes coming – I look forward to your feedback about all of them!
Sincerely,
Chris Deluca – Dev Lead of MSDN and TechNet Subscriptions
