DRIVING: that's what it's ALL ABOUT! A blog and website for automotive driving enthusiasts, featuring my interests as I see them: news and opinion about manufacturers of interest, significant enthusiast cars, and driving them hard and well.
In my initial testing, I quickly found wrong in both Expression Web v1 and v2. Note how the frame below renders in the editor.
The image above is Expression Web v2 - and it's the same in v2.
The image below it is the same frame under FrontPage 2003. Note that it shows correctly (truly WYSIWYG).
The item in question is a table of three rows and several columns. The middle row is only 1 pixel tall. This is suppossed to be the yellow line down the middle of a highway ("driving", get it?). The gearshift knob is an overlay the the upper left corner. That may be effecting how Expression Web presents the editting window. Note that the site does show the page properly in IE 7 or 8, and any of those "other" browsers too.
I'm busy testing beta 1 of Expression Web Version 2. One page from my site is shown to the left.
This just arrived this week, so I have not yet been able to test every feature, let alone try the new ones.
After two days of testing, though, there is one thing very clear. My prior 2 installations of Expression Web Version 1 both suffered from occasional bombs... whereas Version 2 is (so far) 100% stable.
My attempt this morning of incorporating Silverlight v2 "Deep Zoom" failed because of my own lack of knowledge about Silverlight. This would seem to be ideal to close-up zoom of the super high-res photos I like to put into this site. I'll clearly need more help before I can implement this feature...
There are more issues with Expression Web, and I'll go into those in the short term future.
I've participated in every beta of Office and Windows since 1995... a few before that, and now Office 14 is apparently right around the corner.
Since Beta code isn't yet out... I've included a couple of charts showing some of the direction that will be taken. These types of charts are very typical of MS's development process; I've seen similar charts for every release of Office for many years.
I'm looking forward to beta testing Office 14. As before on this site, when it's legally allowed I'll post images and impressions (I at one point had posts of over 500 images of Office 12 and Vista when they were in beta, organized as a "tour"). The Ribbon was the big change for Office 2007 and it is an example of Microsoft at it's absolutely very best.
What would I like to see in the product? Here are a few examples:
The Ribbon interface across the board. And not only in the core Office products, but in the related products such as Streets & Trips (which without the Ribbon is nearly impossible to use - in fact outright dangerous - when in the car alone) and of course Expression Web.
A single options pane for all the Office product basic options (compatibility, save, recovery, print, etc). I would use this to set the file types for compatibility (aka former office formats such as .doc versus .docx). The new formats are causing all sorts of trouble in companies (and customers) which mix releases of Office.
Bring back the Office Binder. I use all kinds of documents to present a point about a single topic; I need a better way to organize them together.
Lets get SharePoint and LiveMeeting better integrated. They're the superior products in the marketplace, more people should know about them. But their integration into Outlook, for example, looks tacked-on and uncoordinated.
OneNote *rules*. I use it for everything and almost never use paper anymore. The advantages of being able to search for anything I've ever entered into OneNote makes OneNote and the Office System the killer application for me. I'd expect to see the Ribbon interface for OneNote. OneNote is probably Microsoft's leading productivity application at the moment and it should be kept to an absolute state-of-the-art product cycle. There are a couple of things happening in Microsoft Research which shold be integrated into OneNote as well (such as InkSeine). IMHO, OneNote seems to have fallen slightly behind the curve in the Office System... when it should be leading-edge. In fact, Onenote new releases should be on a yearly cycle to showcase Microsoft talents and innovation.
Organization... and this thought is not yet fully formed. I have over a million files on my system... to keep my user files organized I keep the notebook structure in OneNote roughly the same hierachy as Outlook and as My Documents. Files in each area are closely related to each other, but I have to look into 3 different areas to find all related files. Question: could the exact same hierarchy be duplicated in each place? And for the longer term, why not the store the same topics in the same place, regardless of which file format or tool they were created from? This has to be something in the file system... it doesn't yet need to extend into the server (and conversely, a server such as SharePoint should not be used to create this functionality - I need to carry everything with me on my laptop). This is something Microsoft Research needs to look at in the longer term... I know some thinking has gone on into this type of organization as far back as ten years ago.
I will absolutely admit it, I miss being a Microsoft employee. When I was in Redmond, an internal share provided daily or weekly builds of every single product of the company. My laptop always had the most recent builds of the upcoming releases of Office and Windows at all times. No pain, no glory: sometimes in the very early cycles the build wasn't workable but at least I gained experience and sent feedback whenever possible. I have no idea if this is done anymore... and certain jerks probably ruined it by privately (and unauthorized) releasing code to the public which is almost always misinterpretted by people that don't understand how the development process works.
These days, I have to rely on MSDN and Connect to get beta code... and those are inconsistent and are almost always frustratingly out of sync with the development cycle and each other. IMHO, MS needs to fix this before betas begin. When the next Office and Windows beta code (or even Alpha, as I did with Vista) becomes available, I'll again build a brand-new and dedicated PC specifically to test them on... and as before I'll also run them on my regular-use systems when appropriate.
Just arrived, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, beta 1.
Seems stable, and fast. All the pages on my site apprear to form properly under it. Many new features worth exploring, including a new source code viewer. This is only beta 1, so expect further features as development continues.
I'm busy testing beta 1 of Expression Web Version 2. One page from my site is shown to the left.
Just arrived, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, beta 1.
