Now that the RC is public, I can finally show/talk about all the stuff I worked on for this release Hopefully relevant to y'all, if only to have someone to blame if you don't actually like it! Last I checked, it looks like I contributed 3-400 icons and well over a hundred UI screens/elements/experiences/interactions for the final product. It feels like so little for two years of time, but man it'll be worth it when people start using the stuff!

Probably my favorite thing is the Agile Software Development graphic I did (thanks in no small part to the dozen or so consultants and coworkers who provided invaluable feedback for months to get it just right):

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd380647(VS.100).aspx

My real #1 contribution though (hopefully) was the TFS Administration Experience. I can finally show off the final visuals [Warning - lots of pictures]

For anyone who hasn't tried it yet, this is one of the best Enterprise class installation and configuration experiences I have ever seen. We have zero-configuration installation on Windows 7 that installs and configures SQL Express for you. We have a one entry standard configuration that provisions SQL Server, SharePoint and IIS together for you. We have an advanced configuration that damn near lets you do whatever you want while still keeping all the hooks automated.















Once you get it all setup and configured (which takes 10-15 minutes for me), you're ready to code. But if you do happen to want to do anything else, there's a fully featured visual administration experience:









And once TFS is up and running, time to fire up Visual Studio and get working! I spent months with a pretty rebel team creating and getting implemented the Ultimate Start Page. That guidance and resources link took a tremendous amount of effort to create the content for, and I really think the new start page will be everyday usable for most of our customers. If you want to learn to use Visual Studio, you can go through this section in a couple of hours and be exposed to 80%+ of the product. And not just flashy demos, but how to use it and WHY its useful.



And then all the fun visualizations I got to work on

Visual tracking of source through branches and time:







I was also given the opportunity to develop the visual style for all of our Architectural Modeling Diagrams. Lots of really neat stuff here. My personal favorite little contribution is the algorithm to provide consistent subtle gradients given a single input color. I never thought I would ever use math again!

You might say "so what, I can do all that in Visio", but these diagrams can model real software, they can validate against your actual codebase, they can link to other work and they can be generated from your code!















[Edited on February 10, 2010 at 2:56 AM. Reason : stinkin link]

2/10/2010 2:56:00 AM

let me be the first to say, WHO CARES? and THEY LOOK JUST AS HIDEOUS AS PREVIOUS MICROSOFT INSTALLATION DIALOGS

congrats on wasting 2 years of your life.

/very obvious troll.

2/10/2010 3:38:09 AM

i want to see a lolcat hidden somewhere

2/10/2010 7:31:42 AM

Keep the commentary relevant folks. I will be deleting posts if you start acting like the dickheads you are.


----


Pretty cool Tyler. I'll never use any of this in my line of work, but that's gotta feel pretty good to have had a hand in developing something this widely used.

2/10/2010 8:19:25 AM

let's see some more of these icons, son




I heard you have some pretty hilarious metaphors

2/10/2010 8:33:59 AM

wait what? no ribbon UI? hehe, j/k.

nice work indeed!

2/10/2010 11:02:01 AM

Im not gonna lie, the new TFS administration and visual change tracking give me a boner.

2/10/2010 11:21:24 AM

^^hahah

Nicely done! I'm impressed.

2/10/2010 11:28:42 AM

Fixed ur agile development graph:

2/10/2010 11:47:28 AM

very clever. is that a crack against agile methodologies in particular or software development in general?

2/10/2010 11:50:51 AM

i guess the problems are common to all, but in my experience agile is often used as an excuse to get something done fast and then abandon it when a new project comes along.

[Edited on February 10, 2010 at 11:53 AM. Reason : a]

2/10/2010 11:53:06 AM

going to quote this picture for truth


You forgot the support/debug circle and overall cost to support/debug delivered excrement. Which you probably couldn't fit on my resolution.

2/10/2010 12:02:44 PM

Apparently you guys haven't ever worked on a real Agile team. There's a night and day difference in perspective between "Agile" teams and Agile teams. The folks who do it right (or anywhere close) absolutely LOVE it, and the ones that don't tend to react as Shaggy and Novicane have.

Shaggy: In a real Agile scrum process, there are no specs. If you mean spec=requirement, then yes. But since the backlog should be coming from a multitude of sources (customers, business, technology, trends) they can't really be "incorrect".

The daily standup is for the team. Customer complaints go on the backlog and get put into the next sprint. The reason Agile has been so successful is that it short circuits the "my problem is more important, so stop whatever you're doing and fix it" mentality of customers and stakeholders.

And if you're adding/changing requirements during a Sprint, it's not a Sprint. That's the whole point of Sprint planning and the agreement between the team and the PO on a plan.

Novicane: I didn't forget that at all. Support can either be done by a different team in it's own sprints, or the single team can integrate support stories from the backlog to handle. And keep in mind that you don't deliver shippable product EVERY sprint. If you're delivering garbage product to your customer, it's likely you needed another sprint specifically to work on defects.

2/10/2010 12:48:34 PM

Quote :

"Shaggy: In a real Agile scrum process, there are no specs. If you mean spec=requirement, then yes. But since the backlog should be coming from a multitude of sources (customers, business, technology, trends) they can't really be "incorrect"."

What i meant by incorrect specs/requirements was that someone goes out and gets the requirements from the client/customer/whoever and then later on in development they get changed because the client/customer/whoever changed their minds or the reqs were taken down wrong.

To be sure none of that is specific to agile, and like you said in my case agile has been used to describle something that isn't actually agile development as you know it.

2/10/2010 12:54:03 PM

Quote :

"What i meant by incorrect specs/requirements was that someone goes out and gets the requirements from the client/customer/whoever and then later on in development they get changed because the client/customer/whoever changed their minds or the reqs were taken down wrong. "

that's the point. would you rather find out they changed their mind (because they WILL change their mind) when you show it to them 2 weeks into development or 9 months into development?

Quote :

" in my case agile has been used to describle something that isn't actually agile development"

so why blame agile development if you're not even doing agile development?

you are right in the sense that a lot of teams like to say they practice agile development as an excuse to change requirements a lot or to avoid process, and because the word agile sounds like it'll make them perform better.

i've done agile for two companies though, where we actually had people who understood the methodology and practiced it. best development experience i've ever had.

[Edited on February 10, 2010 at 2:25 PM. Reason : .]

2/10/2010 2:20:24 PM

lol, software

2/10/2010 7:08:41 PM

Wolfmarsh: You just made several people's days. I haven't had a laugh that good in a while hahaha.

2/10/2010 7:34:00 PM

I know it's too early for this, but I'd like to see a case study or two of this posted once available.

2/10/2010 7:45:17 PM

this is cool, gg

2/10/2010 8:17:39 PM

DEAR NOEN I WANT TO SEE UR ICONS PLX

2/11/2010 11:53:07 PM

I just scrolled through a bunch of pictures of a wizard. Did I miss something?

The diagramming stuff doesn't look bad or good -- looks like enterprise architect etc. Should have gotten an art person to pick a better look and feel for that stuff. The weak pastel gradient look is ~

That aside, has anyone ever worked on software where they used diagrams like that to do important work? I've only seen crappy government employees (redundant) use them as an excuse for not doing work -- most time is spent making more detailed diagrams rather than something that works.

The people I work with who get real work done make good sketches, add sufficient detail to important interfaces, and write their code and comments such that something like doxygen spits out useful output.



[Edited on February 12, 2010 at 7:19 PM. Reason : .]

2/12/2010 7:05:09 PM

tl;dr

2/13/2010 9:50:19 AM

^^ It's not the wizard that's important, it's what the wizard DOES. If you aren't familiar with enterprise services provisioning, it's not going to mean much to you. If you are, then it's the difference between a 4-6 hour manual configuration that is now a 20 minute automated configuration.
With natural language and action error conditions, recovery, rollback, upgrade and n-tier options.

I am an "art person". The look and feel is largely defined by UML, not much anyone can do about that. The colors used are part of a carefully thought out palette that displays well across a myriad of uses: Print, CRT, LCD, Projector. It's also distinguishable for all three major color-impairments, so all colorblind folks can easily distinguish everything across all of the diagrams.

It can all be overridden btw, the user can set whatever colors they like. The lower saturation colors are purposeful, the increase contrast and readability and print more consistently. The subtle gradient is for the same reason. It gives depth on the screen without being obnoxious like the now outdated candy jelly button effect.

As for who uses diagrammatic modeling for software, the answer is a lot of people. You're take on them really just says you don't have a clue WHY they are useful, or what they are used for. The modeling projects in Visual Studio are fundamentally different that standalone diagrams. They can be used to stub-out code (You can create a UML class diagram and generate code from it), and more importantly they can be used to validate your architecture.

There is really no other consistent way to validate and enforce architectural boundaries. For instance, if you are using a MVC architecture, without a validation diagram and model, you can easily bypass the MVC restrictions to have your model talking straight to the controller. Models ensure dependencies and architectural constraints are adhered to.

Also, one of the big pushes with the diagrams is to make them more useful to everyday developers. The sequence diagram is a great example of this. You can select any method and generate a sequence diagram to see the actual message sequences that can affect it. You can also extend functionality to do things like showing a historical trace on a generated sequence diagram to see the path of execution, what methods were touch in what order and where the error occurred.

2/13/2010 5:19:54 PM

You said you made hundreds of icons as part of the VS 2010 suite. What software did you use for that?

Most (free/cheap) graphics software doesn't support saving graphics as icons, which pisses me off majorly because an icon is just a bitmap with a different header. Even MS paint should be able to save as a frickin icon. Years ago I ended up writing a VB6 program that would convert a series of appropriately sized bitmaps to an icon or icon library.

Nowadays, 9 times out of 10 I just steal someone else's icons for my applications.

2/13/2010 5:45:36 PM

we hardly ever use icos. everything in VS is either bmp or png. And I use Photoshop exclusively. It's the only product I know of that can create 32bit bmps.

I unfortunately can't post the icons individually here, but if I have time I'll pull together some screencaps of the various icons on their toolbars in the product.

Just an FYI, theres ~2800 active icons in Visual Studio, and around 5500 total in the catalog (all the deprecated stuff).

2/13/2010 5:54:23 PM

^ cant post them due to disclosure or cant post them because it'd be too hard logistically to make a contact sheet of some of them?


do you straight export them from photoshop, or do you use any plugins?


we've (you know who) been using the iconfactory IconBuilder plugin - we build all of our shit in illustrator and then just drop it into photoshop and it exports them for us without any or very little loss of quality. It's pretty fucking baller.

[Edited on February 13, 2010 at 8:32 PM. Reason : ps LimpyNuts, you can use that same plugin to create ICO files]

2/13/2010 8:31:17 PM

Quote :

"we hardly ever use icos. everything in VS is either bmp or png. And I use Photoshop exclusively. It's the only product I know of that can create 32bit bmps. "

This pisses me off too. It's even more trivial to create a 32-bit bitmap than an icon file, a 24-bit bitmap, or a paletted bitmap. All you do is write the header and just dump the scanlines. No alignment, no palette. Of course, my solution was to create the image in Paint Shop Pro 7 (yeah, that's what I used to use) and save the alpha channel and 24-bit bitmap separately and combine them using my own program. God forbid someone should include the file type as an output on a graphics program that costs $100 or more when the feature literally takes less than 10 minutes to code.

2/14/2010 4:21:52 AM

Jadn: can't for IP reasons.

I use icofx for working with .ico files. It's pretty damn awesome (we have a volume license for axialis but I still prefer the free icofx). I rarely work with icos though because of the time cost (icos have to include all the stepped sizes 16-256 and color depths). Most everything in our product is 16x16 with a smattering of other sizes

2/15/2010 12:39:58 AM

damn IP.


does that change when the product is released?



I'll have to check out icofx - we don't do anything with ICO files right now, but it might be fun to play with.

2/15/2010 9:56:39 AM

Anyone planning on going to the Microsoft Launch 2010 event on June 2 in Raleigh (at NC State, actually)? We're only getting the Developer conference, but that's the one I want anyway. I just signed up.

http://www.microsoft.com/business/2010events/Highlights.aspx

Raleigh event:
https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032446931&Culture=en-US

5/4/2010 9:48:24 AM

Looks like I'll be going.

5/4/2010 10:08:36 AM

bttt to laugh at Shaggy's bastardization of the agile graphic

and also to ask Noen what the heck is up with this dialog box

5/24/2010 5:08:34 PM

That dialog is there pretty much solely because of performance reasons. We had to introduce a lot of scoping options because of the insane time it can take to calculate for tracing a changeset. Definitely not an ideal experience and something I hope to either dramatically simplify or eliminate entirely from vNext.

[Edited on May 24, 2010 at 6:00 PM. Reason : .]

5/24/2010 5:58:53 PM

well, i don't mind the fact that the functionality is presented via a dialog box. i'm more curious about the fact that it's not even a real dialog box. it looks like a fake dialog box constructed through wpf canvas z-indexing. you can tell from the border and the fake maximize/close buttons. even the icons within the dialog look a little fuzzy

[Edited on May 24, 2010 at 7:08 PM. Reason : all around, just really stands out]

5/24/2010 7:07:34 PM

Yep, we went back and forth on how to treat that. It's a pop-in dialog box, meaning it's modal but only to the document tab. This is the same model that Google Chrome uses, but it's pretty obvious that it's not visually consistent with the rest of the shell

Count that as the downside of having one designer for a hundred developers

5/24/2010 8:00:25 PM

MOAR JS INTELLISENSE/SYNTAX CHECKINZ PWZ.

[Edited on May 25, 2010 at 12:43 AM. Reason : EH]

5/25/2010 12:42:58 AM

So is VS2010 going to build native MacOS/iPhone/iPad apps or what?

'cause that'd be the shit.

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/05/26/microsofts-steve-ballmer-to-present-during-wwdc-2010-keynote/
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2010/05/24/daily79.html

5/27/2010 1:13:38 PM

If i can write an app for both iphone and wp7 at the same time that would be the most ownage thing.

5/27/2010 1:18:29 PM

Please let it be so so I can sell this fucking iMac

5/27/2010 1:21:20 PM

screw wp7

if i could write iphone apps in silverlight, in Windows, that'd be pretty tight

[Edited on May 27, 2010 at 1:22 PM. Reason : i'd probably keep my MBP, but at least i can ditch snow leopard]

5/27/2010 1:22:25 PM

http://twitter.com/microsoft

Quote :

"Steve Ballmer not speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor riding in the Belmont. Just FYI"

bummer

5/27/2010 3:08:33 PM

Could still be the other guy

Quote :

"Chowdrey further reported that the stage time will be taken by either Ballmer or Microsoft's server and tools chief Bob Muglia."

While it would be funny/neat to see Ballmer at the WWDC I'd rather have the rumored VS capability.

5/27/2010 3:36:15 PM

An announcement like that is huge though. Thats why it was such a believable rumor in the first place.

This makes me think the compatibility isnt going to happen

5/27/2010 4:04:50 PM

i wish i could use the WM5/6 SDKs with VS2010 so i could ditch 2008

also, it feels very, very dirty (blasphemous, even) to be running VS2010 on my mac pro at work in a parallels VM in coherence mode

5/28/2010 2:05:05 AM

VS is about un-mac-like as you can get. Monolithic, slow, disorganized, crappy dialogue boxes. It's like the microsoft word of software development. I'm also not sure why people think an IDE has anything to do with making software cross-platform-compatible between iphone and wp7. That's just bizarre.

5/28/2010 3:30:45 AM

and you're saying xcode is much better?

i mean, come on... i'm one of the bigger apple fanboys on here and even i'm not really a fan of developing in xcode...

5/28/2010 8:41:16 AM

Nevermind. Figured it out.

[Edited on May 28, 2010 at 8:50 AM. Reason : .]

5/28/2010 8:43:20 AM

An IDE has something to do with cross platform apps when that IDE is Visual Studio. VS is synonymous with c# and therefore any rumours of VS on osx are rumours of C# on osx.

5/28/2010 9:45:39 AM

I understood the rumor to be VS on windows, building software for apple stuff. That's the only thing that would interest me.

Quote :

"i wish i could use the WM5/6 SDKs with VS2010 so i could ditch 2008"

I thought 2010 was supposed to be better about letting you use compilers and stuff from older versions (presuming you still have to have them installed) in the new IDE


[Edited on May 28, 2010 at 10:51 AM. Reason : .]

5/28/2010 10:50:25 AM

vs on windows making osx/iphone stuff would mean objectionable c. I'd much much rather have c# on iphone/osx.

5/28/2010 11:00:26 AM