As Hillel (
http://themicrosoftexperience.com/default.htm) points out, its not really a blog if you don’t blog for months, so this is my delayed New Years resolution to write something at least once a week even if I have nothing to say :-)
One of the things that exciting and sometimes challenging at Microsoft is working on leading edge technologies, sometimes because we choose to and sometimes because it’s the right thing to do to provide internal groups with feedback, this is called dogfooding.
When we first started working on the new UI tools for Yukon and we made the call to write in managed code, the .Net Platform was not called .Net and there was no (usable) winforms designer, so we mostly built UI in code. This was a tough time, the platform was not that stable and it was not nearly as mature as VC6 (this is what we used for the Tools in SQL 2000) or VB6 (which is what pieces of the Analysis Services UI is written in). One person felt most of the frustrations from the SQL UI teams and that was Mark Boulter who at the time seemed like the only PM in Winforms (he may well have been, I know for sure he is not the only one now). To be honest I am surprised he survived and ever spoke to us again as he had to take a lot of stick from the team.
Fast forward in time, VS 7 and then VS 7.1 shipped, with relatively minor changes in winforms. Fast forward again to Yukon Beta 1 and VS Whidbey’s Alpha, while our SQLCLR implementation was built on Whidbey in the UI space we stayed with Everett for a variety of reasons I won’t get into just yet. About 6 weeks ago we switched the Yukon UI over to use Whidbey, however given where we are in the Yukon cycle we are not going to go away and rewrite the whole thing to leverage Whidbey’s new features.
As luck would have it we have a new UI element that we are developing from scratch right now that’s really exciting (you’ll have to wait until B2 and RTM to see it), so we decided to write it leveraging Whidbey from Day 1. Hence we invited Mark to come back and see us and talk about all the changes in Winforms.
As expected Mark did a stellar job and managed to seriously impress the cynical crowd gathered in front of him, one of his themes in the presentation was to point out where they had made changes in response to the "feedback" we had provided for him and the team during the development of VS 7. Many of you probably know what is coming in Whidbey having been to PDC or having watched the sessions online here:
http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC2003/CLI/CLI210_files/Default.htm
But for the majority of our team who have been heads down on Yukon this was all new. Here are my top 3 cool things about Winforms in Whidbey:
1/ The new productivity features in the Winforms designer for aligning controls, control layout, smart tasks etc.
2/ The new support for localizing resource information, especially the performance improvements.
3/ The Outlook 2003/IE sample apps, the outlook one may not be real but it looks very cool.
While we didn’t ask for the Outlook 2003 UI many of the features in Whidbey winforms are as a result of early feedback from the SQL UI teams, other teams in MS and all the folks out there, I think Mark and the team did a stellar job reacting to the feedback.
So hopefully the end result is worth the dogfooding experience we had several years ago
I did promise some SQL Server content for the next posting. We are going to be hosting an online chat on SQL Server Admin next week, please come and join in, you get to give myself, some others from the team and also some MVP's a hard time with questions:
http://www.sqlpass.org/Community/chat/index.cfm
While we are talking about PASS did you know we are going to talking about Yukon at the PASS Conference later this year? There will be some sessions during the main conference and we are going to be running a pre-conf day on Yukon, you need to sign an NDA for it but we are going to be covering a lot of content.
http://www.sqlpass.org/events/seattle03/index.cfm
Last year we had well over 100 members of the dev team at the conference, this year we want to have even more.
While we are talking about Yukon, are you going to PDC? The SQL Server Dev Team will be there, talking about Yukon, no NDAs required :-) Some of the sessions are already listed here http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/tracks.aspx there are also going to be a bunch of Birds of a Feather sessions and Community meetings when the team is down there.
Oh and the most public info we have talked in Yukon is posted in this interview I did, there are some errors, I'll post corrections in a later blog: http://www.itwriting.com/sqlyukon.php someone asked why I looked so grumpy, I don't really have a good excuse but I did do more than 20 interviews as well as my sessions at the conference, and was ill while there. Next year I intend to be interviewed wearing my Krusty the Clown mask :-)