When Written: Oct 2007
One demonstration that seemed to be lacking at this event was showing the new Microsoft vision of programmers and designers working together on an application. Microsoft has been making big noises about their developing tools enabling this. If this is so then why don’t they show this in work? We were subjected to half an hour of coding to show how the colour of a box could be changed and how the mouse-over look could be hard coded. This is all stuff that should be left to the design tools. The vision as it has been described to me is that the web application functionality can be programmed up and tested whilst the designers can take the web forms and work their magic turning the pages into something cool looking and user friendly.
So please Microsoft, start showing us how this vision of yours works: we want to use code to connect to data sources, manipulate that data, but the display and user interface should be designed by the design tools not hard coded in C# , VB or JavaScript. If we don’t see convincing demonstrations of this soon I guess we must assume that it is all too difficult to get working and Microsoft prefers to spend its time giving us another new query language or office document format.
On the plus side, and to be fair, a huge improvement has been made to Visual Studio 2008. One major improvement is in its rendering engine. This previously was so poor as to be of little use, so its replacement by the excellent rendering engine from the Expressions Web Suite is very welcome. Now the design view bears a close resemblance of how the page will look in a browser.
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton