Many thanks to everyone who commented on our previous post, Help Choose the Whidbey Search Window Layout.  Here's a summary of what we heard from you:
1 - real estate is always at a premium
2 - if you change filters, you do so infrequently
3 - therefore, you'd like the ability to collapse filters
4 - if filters are applied to a search, you need to know that there are filters applied-- the design shown for collapsing didn't provide this
5 - several users noted that they often switch back and forth between filtered and unfiltered search
6 - you use a variety of docking options for the search results window: bottom-docked, floating, multi-monitor, and varying sizes. you underscored the need to make docking flexible.

OK, so taking into account this feedback, here's a V2 design including a checkbox to let you know if search is filtered or not, and to be able to switch filters on or off.  Better?  Worse?  Any other comments or feedback?  Note that the "show/hide filters" links are placeholders until we get feedback from our designers on a better (hopefully more graphical) way to represent expand/collapse operations. 

Figure 1 - Filters Expanded

Figure 2 - Filters Collapsed

Figure 3 - Filters Disabled

Other notes responding to your feedback:

• we won't restrict docking-- like all Tool Windows in VS, you can float the Search window, can dock it bottom or top, or can make it into a full-size window (e.g. just like the MDI windows used to edit code).  Full-screen will be the default (to make search easier for novices who are used to a full-screen web-style search) but you can easily dock/float it by right-clicking on the "Search" tab and choosing "dockable" or "floating".  Note that by default search results will show up with a 3-5 line "abstract" like you see in a Web Search.  To turn this off, right-click on results and uncheck "Show Abstract"-- you can still see the abstract as a tooltip which shows up when you hover the mouse over a search result.
• many of you suggested docking on the side, and a few of you noted that side-docking would be a challenge because search titles are often long and would take up too much horizontal space.  the latter reason is why we'll make the default docked position on the bottom-- but of course you can change it if you are lucky enough to have a monitor big enough for side-docking to work well. :-)
• To Marco, who asked: "why the results need to be in the same tool window as the Search itself? It's not very consistent to have a tool window titled "Search" with a tab titled "Index Results for 'messagebox'"."
  Marco - what you're seeing is a glitch in the screenshot.  Index results and Search will be separate tool windows, like in Visual Studio today. 

To set expectations, it's very late in the Whidbey design cycle, so we may not be able to get this design above into Whidbey but may have to wait until the next one.  But your feedback will definitely help argue for more flexibility this release.

Thanks again!
The Visual Studio Help Team

 

Welcome to the blog dedicated to discussing the Help and Community features of Visual Studio.  All of the people involved in bringing you the new Help and Community features will be hanging out here.  We've got tons of people on the team who like to talk about what they do and what we've been busy building for Visual Studio 2005.  But hey, we can talk all day.  We also want to hear from you.  For those of you who have been using the Community Tech Preview releases, tell us how you like VS 2005 so far.  Tell us how you get Help while developing today.  We want to hear all about it.