I'm not sure they want those to disappear. Some of Microsoft's own products are written using Win32, like Office, and Internet Explorer. I think this is more about providing a C++ compiler for developers that are unable to spend the $499 on Visual Studio Professional.
Because they keep acting like it. As say this as someone who develops Windows desktop apps. You might have valid counterarguments to that, but that is the perception I have and I don't think I'm alone.
I really think it's just that Metro/WinRT is the new thing, they're always going to be trumpeting the new features of the new release as if they're the only thing anyone should care about, that's unfortunately a Microsoft habit. The desktop will quietly continue to persist and evolve.
I don't expect much success with Windows 8, due to a combination of there being a lot of genuine rough edges and gaps in the new environment and in how it relates to the desktop, most people not really feeling a need for a new version of Windows right now anyway, and people's normal resistance to change. However, they'll probably continue to improve the Metro stuff in future Windows versions, and eventually it will just become another boring established part of Windows that everyone takes for granted. At which point it won't be the new shiny anymore and balance will be restored.
Well this restores my faith somewhat; glad to see the focus on Metro isn't non-negotiable. VS 2005 had a similar problem, when it just dropped support for the Web App (precompiled) style in favour of an ASP/PHP model. Right after shipping they released an update to restore the removed feature.
I wonder if this "Desktop" version will have the ALL CAPS menu titles. Their rational for that in the regular version iirc is that it fits with metro better for some reason.
It would be strange to make a non-metro version of Visual Studio have those menus with that rational, but it would also be weird to have two versions of Visual Studio, one with capped menus and the other without.
As a member of the VS team (but not one who is in charge of making these decisions) I can't comment in any official capacity. I can say I am not a fan of the ALL CAPS menus, but, strangely enough, my personal opinion doesn't drive decisions in a multi-million dollar product unit :).
This is of course not officially supported and my being a VS team member does not imply a contract for this registry key to exist for all time or on any specific SKU.
Wow, that all caps menu is ugly. I hadn't seen that before. As the only person I can talk to working on VS team.. I hold you personally responsible. "Fix It!"
Feedback was given in that general direction before the public release. I guess it goes to show that while our feedback was viewed as...less than representative, they (UX)got the general idea when the public feedback was...mostly identical :) NOTE: The previous rambling statement was in regards to general UX treatment in the Beta/RC timeframes, not on the ALL CAPS menus in particular, but feedback has definetly been given (by myself and others, internal and external) on that topic. They certainly are aware of the feedback.
I'm very surprised to learn that all caps menus were intentional. I thought it was for some other reason - maybe something along the lines of what we at Borland called "egging", i.e. using odd international characters to test for internationalization errors; in other words, maybe it was testing for UI spacing or something.
What I find strange (not sure how true) is what I hear from random MS employees that customer feedback is more valuable, or weighs more, than the feedback from MS employees. To me, this shows a low level of trust from management in their own employees' ability to gauge the market.
Another thing I can't wrap my mind around is how can it be possible to have one thousand of your customers yelling at you they don't like something -- that can be easily changed -- and have the management respond with "Oh well, we're still going to do what we want. What ya gonna do about it?!"
>What I find strange (not sure how true) is what I hear from random MS employees that customer feedback is more valuable, or weighs more, than the feedback from MS employees.
In my experience it is the classic (and often correct) "You aren't the target audience". For instance, I could write code on the Excel team (I don't). I am not a heavy Excel user, so my feelings on how Excel should be set up or operate likely do not represent the actual users of Excel and thus my feedback should be weighted lower than real (paying) customer feedback. Talk is cheap, people exchanging money for a product should be listened to above whiny devs (the 'whiny dev' label is intended to apply only to me and my feedback. External customers giving feedback are not whiny devs, at least not in my eyes :)).
Visual Studio is somewhat of an exception to this general rule because us oddball developer types (who don't represent the mainstream customer of most any product) actually do represent (mostly) the mainstream customer of our product.
>Another thing I can't wrap my mind around is how can it be possible to have one thousand of your customers yelling at you they don't like something -- that can be easily changed -- and have the management respond with "Oh well, we're still going to do what we want. What ya gonna do about it?!"
thousands << millions. The user base of Visual Studio is large, I don't know exact install numbers (I am sure I could find out, I just have never been curious enough to pester someone in marketing or the PM org) but I know it is definitely in the millions. It isn't clearly incorrect to argue that 1000 people playing with the beta may be a different group and have different beliefs than the millions of eventual users. I am not saying it is true or not, I haven't done the market research, but it isn't implausible.
I agree that thousands < millions, but was there a study to see how those millions feel about the UI? The change was from beta to RC. Was there really a study done in such a short time to ask those millions? If such studies exist then why even bother asking for feedback in a public forum? Anything you'd get would be statistical noise.
Since the changes were quite drastic between beta and RC, my guess would be no, there was no study. If there was a study then I would question the competency of the people of carried out the study given how off the mark the results were (VS beta UI).
My guess is that the UX/UI people didn't really know what they were doing. They saw the massive backlash and went "Oh OK, I guess we were a little bit off. Let us remove most of these upper case captions, but we can't get rid of them entirely, so let's change the menu to upper case." When the second wave of backlash came (over the menu) the UX/UI people already had their pride bruised so they couldn't back down again.
>When the second wave of backlash came (over the menu) the UX/UI people already had their pride bruised so they couldn't back down again.
Possibly, but I suspect it is, as they have already stated, driven by the desire to align some UX look and feel consistency across 'major products'. I don't know if I quite 'buy' the idea that all caps menus in VS and all caps menus in Office give you any 'alignment', but you know, I am but a dev not a UX person :)
You do not need that study of millions. Let's say you talk to 100 customers who you think to be a representatieve sample. One or two make a remark on the issue. Two weeks later, you ask them about it, and they say it grows on you.
Now, you send out the beta. You expect 1-3% or so of your customers to make a remark on it. Maybe 1‰ will contact you or write a blog post. Should that worry you? No.
And of course, you should be even less worried if you had measured performance related to the issue, and saw no differences.
In short: those thousands are self-selected and not representative of the audience. On top of that, all reviewers have to have some critique. Critisizing (nicely symmetrical, with all vowels being i's, and the symmetry of consonants; but I am digressing) such an obviously visible feature is easy.
Listening to customers is not the end all or be all of UX or product design and neither should it be. It should be taken into account, but UX experts surprisingly know better much of the time. The one constant is that people don't like change, whether good or bad, and that decision cannot be made by listening to a vocal group of commenters.
This has always bothered me: I'm not the target user, but then who is? Some of the more unprofessional product managers can use this as a mantra when they really have no clue.
On the other hand, when you include a designer in your product, you really have to let them do their job! Yes, feedback (external and internal) will be killer, but if they are good and know what they are doing, they won't let this sway them: they want to deliver a product that you will love, that you didn't know you wanted, and not necessarily what you asked for. Professional UX design with IDEs seems rather new (e.g., Cloud9), and developers are surprisingly a rather conservative lot. But if you want innovation from your IDE vendor, you should give them some room to experiment and possibly make mistakes.
VS is not a Metro app: All versions of Visual Studio run on the desktop - what this article is referring to is a free version of VS with the capability to create desktop apps, which was removed from the free version of VS2012 that was already announced.
The all-caps menus are part of the Metro "design language," which is related to but separate from actual Metro applications that run within the new non-desktop interface. Additionally, it's already been revealed that there will be a setting to return the menus to regular capitalization, and it can be done in the beta via a registry key.
Not true (to my knowledge) it hasn't been stated there will be any such exposed setting (to my knowledge, if I am wrong feel free to cite sources). There is a reg key switch, but there are lots of reg key switches in VS.
Edit: As drivebyacct2 points out below I am wrong, it HAS in fact been officially stated. I don't see any attribution on the blog entry, but I suspect I know who wrote it and it is an official Microsoft blog, so that is a public announcement. Done and done.
>That said, we will enable you to customize the casing, and we are exploring options for how to expose that choice. We will post again once we’ve settled on a final approach to be available in RTM.
Yay! I stand corrected. Sorry, I hadn't seen that. I don't tend to keep up on the blog as I have had negative experience in trying to interact with customers via the comment section before (and reading the comments in general) :)
In my experience such interaction generally takes the form (some hyperbole for humorous effect):
Customer: You are incompetent because you made decision X.
Me: We made decision X for the following reasons (enumerate things that weighed in on the decision).
Customer: You are worse than Hitler and need to die.
Of course interactions like this are childish and unproductive. However, I feel that these are symptoms of being ignored. When people feel that the VS side has their fingers in their ears, one needs to yell louder to be heard. Claiming to paying attention to feedback when clearly not doing so is also quite frustrating.
A counter-example is how ScottGu handles situations like this -- or used to, nowadays he doesn't seem to have that much free time. When one posts about a problem on his blog he gets personally involved and assigns somebody to get it fixed. On the other side, one thousand people ask for the same thing and they're being ignored. Do you see my point?
>When people feel that the VS side has their fingers in their ears, one needs to yell louder to be heard.
The problem is the people they are 'yelling louder' at are not the people making the decisions, they are simply the ones that have to/volunteer to face the mob. I try and be civil in my feedback for products I use even if I am pissed off because I know there is a human being at the other end and they are more than likely operating under similar constraints/deadlines/rules as everyone else in the world. Sometimes I disagree with their decisions, sometimes violently, but I try to approach the conversation from the mindset that they aren't simply doing it to annoy me, because they aren't.
>Claiming to paying attention to feedback when clearly not doing so is also quite frustrating.
Not sure how we could be considered to be ignoring people. Have you seen this announcement? Have you seen the massive UX changes due to Beta feedback? The only thing I can think of is the ALL CAPS issue, but that actually came in RC itself, and as someone else pointed out in the GP of this thread, that is also announced as being something that users will be able to tweak.
>A counter-example is how ScottGu handles situations like this -- or used to, nowadays he doesn't seem to have that much free time.
ScottGu is a VP now, he likely doesn't involve himself personally in many issues like that anymore as it doesn't scale and his time is more valuably spent in other pursuits.
>On the other side, one thousand people ask for the same thing and they're being ignored. Do you see my point?
I would if people were actually being ignored, I don't see anything in any recent announcement that would indicate that. Care to point out an issue with lots of feedback that is being ignored? And to be clear I don't consider "ignored" == "not doing what I want them to". Feedback can be given, even at large volume, and not result in a change of course. If the people making the decisions feel, even in the light of the feedback, that their course is correct that is their decision to make. Ignoring would be simply not even addressing the feedback at all and just blindly going about your planned course as if the feedback didn't exist.
If I think to the major feedback points I recall they were
Feedback: Don't like only being able to make Metro apps with Express.
Conclusion: See the post this thread is located in.
Feedback: Hate (dislike strongly) the UX in Beta.
Conclusion: See the RC release.
Feedback: Hate the ALL CAPS menu in RC.
Conclusion: See blog post where it was said officially that there will be a way to tweak this (not sure what that way will be, but it will be present).
Feedback: Hate that I can't build things in C++ that target XP using 2012.
Conclusion: Still sad panda (I have no hand in that matter though so I can't speak with any intelligence on it).
Again, I'm not saying that being rude or inconsiderate is ever justified. However, when trying to look at a response from a psychological point of view, you kind of have to throw out notions about what is right and wrong as these tend to taint the data. The fact that people felt like they had to keep commenting and commenting saying the same thing over and over should tell us something.
When the original beta was introduced it was not a "hey guys, what do you think of the new UI" type of announcement. It was more of a "this is the new UI, it adheres to the latest and greatest design trends, is better, prettier, more 'energetic'; you will love it!" People felt patronized so they gave their feedback in droves.
This later set the tone that the only way they're going to listen is if we bury them in feedback. Of course this is unfortunate as good feedback was probably lost in the noise.
>Also, there's tons of feedback that is being ignored:
Here are the top requests:
>Change All CAPS Menu in VS RC to VS Beta format File Edit Instead of FILE EDIT
Already beat to death in this thread, and there has been a public blog post, hardly ignored.
>Add some color to Visual Studio 11
See RC release. Also see the comments section where there are posts from VS team members, so ignored is not quite the right word. I find a certain irony in the comments asking for the 2010 theme back, when we released 2010 there was a large amount of feedback of people that hated 2010 and wanted 2008 back.
>Make .NET 4.5 work on any OS that supports 4.0
See my comment about this not being resolved. It certainly isn't being ignored though.
>Visual Studio 11 Express on Windows 7 and the ability to write non Metro C++ applications in it.
Hmmm yeah something about that link I posted to start this whole thread.
>change the new 2012 RC bowtie icon back to the smooth style
Well, suggestion I guess. I doubt that will happen (branding changes are generally made by marketing). There is no comment there so this is the first one I think you could say has 'been ignored'.
>Leave VS 2010 theme (and the theme editor extension) as an option
Well okay, unlikely to happen, re-theming VS is not a small undertaking (we have multiple UI technologies in play, it isn't as simple as declaring a CSS file) and supporting 3 (dark + light + 2010) would be a large undertaking. As for the theme editor, it is still there, in fact it was written by the guy in the office next to me. I don't think it is 'going anywhere' and I would be shocked beyond belief if it didn't support 2012.
There are many more, I guarantee you there are PMs that have read every single one of those (fun times!). Not all have comments, so I guess if that is where you are going with 'being ignored' then it is accurate, but it is a bit of a stretch considering the most popular ones have all been addressed in one form or another.
I get what you are saying about the psychology, it is funny this all started because I made a comment on how I don't read the comments because, in my experience, they are fairly vituperative. That is me, I am not here representing as an official spokesman for VS or Microsoft so please don't apply that label to me as I have gone out of my way to make it clear I am NOT such a role. If you think no one is reading them, well I doubt I could convince you otherwise, though it is clearly not true.
>Feedback: Hate that I can't build things in C++ that target XP using 2012.
lol. I apparently need to come give the VS team a brief on the VS team decisions. They've reacted to that crticism as well and are going to release an Express SKU with Desktop support.
No, that release targets 'all OS versions that 2012 supports'. XP is not in that list. And in fact that link is just the link that the Ars link I posted to points to (whew). The problem with XP is that the CRT in 2012 is not supported on XP, thus any programs you built on it that depend on said CRT would not run on XP.
Well the comments there are more or less that, which is sad to see. I like that the VS team (and many teams it seems) are responding well to public feedback and making smart decisions that can make everyone happy. It's just sad to see people can't respect the VS team's default decision, even when they agree to expose it as a setting. That's users for you.
"VS is not a Metro app: All versions of Visual Studio run on the desktop"
That was my understanding. I guess I expressed myself poorly. I was wondering why a piece of software that is apparently explicitly for 'Desktop' (as in creating things for it) would sacrifice sensibility for the sake of any Metro concepts.
I don't know, the entirety of it is weird to me, so maybe this makes more sense to somebody who understands the reasoning behind everything else about windows 8.
What's really really interesting to me is that they've removed the ribbon from the menu system. I'm happy about this, but I know a lot of people loved the ribbon UI.
Or at least it appears that way from the screenshots in your link.
So, is Express for Desktop the only wait to get a free C++ compiler from Microsoft now? Last I read, they removed the C++ compiler and C runtime from the Windows SDK.
What made them make that decision in the first place? Didn't they know it would lead to significant blowback? I bet the VS devs weren't the ones that made it.
So have they restored the ability to use Win32 in VS Express? Or just the ability to write .NET/WinRT apps that target the Windows 8 desktop environment? It's not clear from the announcement.
>Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop will provide a simple, end-to-end development experience for developing Windows desktop applications targeted to run on all versions of Windows supported by Visual Studio 2012.
From my reading of corporate speak this appears to say that you can use Express Desktop 2012 (VNext Ultimate Web Cloud Edition :)) to write apps that target Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8. Since WinRT is Win8+ only that would seem to imply 'down level' apps would need to be written in something else. The primary candidates would seem to be WPF/Silverlight, MFC, Winforms or Win32. Since Winforms/MFC are just thin wrappers over the Win32 APIs I think it would be torturous to try and make an IDE that allowed writing WinForms/MFC but somehow prevented direct Win32 access (especially given the ability to simply use pInvoke from managed code).
