What is Team 99? And some Longhorn thoughts.

I got a ping via Skype last night from William Luu and he mentioned that he had nominated me to be part of Team 99. What is Team 99? Well from what I can tell Team 99 is the brainchild of Robert Scoble. The idea is that Microsoft will solicit feedback from a small group of people in the hope of making Longhorn better before it ships.

It seems like a reasonable idea to me, although many folks have already alluded to the statistical skewing that will occur with a group of bloggers (one of the requirements). Anyway – Robert started a thread over on Channel 9 to allow people to add their nominations – go and nominate those who you think would represent your views!

Personally I think it would be a lot of fun to really talk about what Longhorn means, obviously from developer perspective I think about Longhorn as a set of enhancements to allow me to deliver more compelling applications to users with more ease. Obviously things like Avalon and Indigo, and eventually WinFS are a big part of that.

For Avalon its more than just a new graphics stack (which is nice too – don’t get me wrong). What it really does is give developers an application model to hang their solutions off, take the NavigationApplication as a classic example. It makes your application look like its part of the explorer shell.

The differentiator between Avalon on Windows XP and Avalon on Longhorn is going to be shell extensibility. In Longhorn we will have managed API’s (this is what we saw that the PDC) for things like pop-up-toast and sidebar tiles. One thing that I am interested to learn about is how Microsoft drive that extensibility further.

One problem that I see with applications today is that they are monolithic entities both from a UI point of view and from a data point of view. WinFS was (in my mind) designed to tackle the data issue, and when it gets here I am sure it will with its strong relational capabilities. But what about the UI?

If you look at some of the most usable applications today they seem to have employed an inductive user interface – but you still have to find the application before you get that experience – and you can only experience it from within the four walls of your application.

What I would like to do is take those business tasks that are locked inside the application and expose them as first class citizens in places like the start menu – break those applications up dammit! What this means is that instead of trying to design one huge solution, you just roll little XAML apps and deploy them piecemeal – with click once?

Will it work? It could – but Microsoft has to make it clear to developers how they intend them to use their shiny new operating system.

P.S. William, I didn’t ignore you last night – my ADSL connection dropped out. Apparently all of the ACT was down for iinet.

Adding using constructs via Visual Studio 2005 Smart-Tags.

Quick, I had better post this before Darren does so that he doesn’t spoil his nice pristine blog. This is a nice little feature that he told me about today where if you type in a class which hasn’t been imported via a namespace it will offer to add that namespace via a smart-tag. You activate the smart tag after adding the class name and press SHIFT-ALT-F10. The picture below shows what the smart tag looks like.

NewsGator Listens

Recently I posted up how difficult it was to find the download for the NewsGator plug-in for Microsoft Outlook as a paying customer on their site. I got an e-mail today with a comment that the support crew at NewsGator had left. Apparently they’ve put an entry in on their support page so you can put in your e-mail address and it’ll e-mail you your license key and a location to download the file from. Great work guys – I look forward to using it next time I rebuild my machine.

Trust the people who work for you or fire them.

I was stopped leaving the office today at lunch time on my way down to the cafe. The reason I was stopped was because I was carrying my laptop under my arm and was planning on writing up a couple of small blog posts while I was down there. After assuring them that it was indeed my property (actually its Readify property) I was allowed to go – strangely it the .NET user group stickers from the MSDN Connections program that was the proof they needed (go figure).

Anyway – it got me thinking about employees and theft, but also trust more generally. It seems to me that there is something seriously wrong when you can’t trust your employees.

I know I know I’m living in a fantasy world – but really, there has to be something seriously wrong with your hiring processes of you can’t filter out the riff-raff, and this is before we even get to raw competency. You know whats sadder? For the most part we accept it as the norm.