Monday, February 16, 2004 - Posts
As we're looking at launching our current development/build environment, we would love to start using MSBuild right now. Since MSBuild is not released, Microsoft may have provided us the next best thing. Andy Reeves, Solution Development Lead at Microsoft UK, provides a download to the .NET Solution Build & Deployment Process & Tools, which appears to not only include the precursor of MSBuild, build.exe, but also a build environment to boot. Moreover, Andy says, and I quote:
In the next version of the .NET Framework MSBuild will ship with the framework.
Do not underestimate what this means. There will be an xml based, written by Microsoft, supported, universal build and task engine on every box that has the framework. The libraries here work now with MSBuild and provide you with an automatic conversion path between this build system and MSBuild.
If they will provide an automatic conversion from their SDC to MSBuild, than it would be much better to go with this product rather than NAnt.
Korby Parnell, doc writer for VSS, shares a bit of what they're up to with VSS. Check out his comment at the bottom of the comments. Maybe VSS will actually make it into this century. They're going to have resiziable dialogs! Can client/server be far behind? Here's his teaser.
Microsoft is working on a new book on user experience guidelines for Longhorn called the The Windows User Experience Cookbook. They have already published an excerpt.
Upshot? Inductive UI lives. This is how MS wants you to do data entry.
The cookbook will be a companion to a revised and expanded Windows User Experience Guidelines. (As yet grossly incomplete).
One should be looking closely at this because it speaks of where Microsoft wants us to be 2 years down the road. This is tomorrow's news, not yesterdays.
More good stuff on Longhorn UI:
Picking the Right Degree of Control for User Interfaces
Helps to decide on the trade-off of whether the computer or user is in charge of the user experience.
Application Archetypes
Details the six major types of documents. On my current contract, it looks as though we're working on a Document Editor Application with some Database Application thrown in for good measure.