Straight to Video

(More history of the DHTML Editing Control)

Once the thrill of packaging up some cool technology and releasing it to the public gave way to the gruesome reality of servicing an operation system component, the youthful bloom was off the DHTML Editing Control.  Feature enhancements were not to be approved.  I think we had one very minor added feature (although I don't remember what it was) as we moved from private distribution to OS distribution.  Bug fixes did continue, however.

Jeff took over as Program Manager and did a good job of keeping up the community effort.  I remember having an online conference once with quite a few attendees, and he was a prolific communicator.  Expanding usage turned up a few functional bugs, mostly related to Far Eastern scripts, which we got taken care of--I believe by the time IE 5.0 shipped.

Our team got to work on Visual Studio 7 and I remember missing almost the entire first milestone because of work on the control.  It got pretty disconcerting, because I had a few features I wanted to get to work on; frameset editing and absolute positioning.  We finally got through our bug list and shipped a functionally solid version of the control.  I wish I had the exact version number, but I purged most of my email some time ago.  I shifted focus to Visual Studio, we lost Jeff, and focus shifted off the control.

One internal partner that adopted the control and kept us well aware of any problems which came up during OS upgrades and patches was the OWA team (Outlook Web Access.)  Their test automation was extensive and well crafted; a few problems did crop up as IE tightened security and we had to make tandem changes in the control.  We got a lot of great input fro their QA team and we owe them a lot.  Thanks, ya'll!  OWA rocks.