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Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

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Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#321

Post by dragonshed »

artmageddon wrote: post #169
morrbo wrote: post #142

Why not C#? Seems a bit of a missed opportunity to feed some of the APIs undoubtedly created for this into the new .net core stuff. I guess i'll just keep dreaming of the day when i can reliably convert a docx into a pdf without using office interop.

Reading this thread, with all the Javascript talk, makes me feel like I should be scared of continuing to be a C# developer..

I made this change back in 2011 when the Windows 8 developer preview with WinRT single-handedly annihilated all the WPF & Silverlight consulting work. The writing was on the wall for months, but for me the last straw was the JavaScript WinRT apps.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#322

Post by privacypoller »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #310
morrbo wrote: post #142

Why not C#? Seems a bit of a missed opportunity to feed some of the APIs undoubtedly created for this into the new .net core stuff. I guess i'll just keep dreaming of the day when i can reliably convert a docx into a pdf without using office interop.

C# doesn’t easily compile to the web. This is why they are rewriting office 365 in the first place right?

They just demoed running a winforms app in the browser using .NET CORE so maybe it would be less work/more successful to explore this path instead of trying to somehow re-implement the oxygen-sucking monster that is Excel using only the "new hotness (tm)".

I bet this is only the new stuff like Delve and the less functional, more social apps/components. I can't imagine how they could pull this off for a full version of Excel or even Word or PP..

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#324

Post by privacypoller »

nwsm wrote: post #231
leeter wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I can imagine MS would love to kill VBA it would be a major loss of business if they did. Oil and Gas lives in the stuff and would probably even sue MS if VBA died. That said could it be getting a much needed fixup... probably. I suspect the same is true of COM plugins.

I'm in Oil and Gas app dev, we are .net with no VBA. I guess I'm lucky.

Don't count yourself so sure - A lot of shadow IT gets done by that excel expert in finance or the engineer who took a programming elective. If anyone ever gave them a database login password, odds are they're pulling into excel or access and writing VBA!

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#325

Post by chengmau »

chengmau wrote: post #311

I know the architecture too good, more than I need as I was leaving MS recently. This tweet is not likely to happen. Talking about desktop apps, this doesn't make any sense. Office apps have millions of lines in code and many years of lost knowledge between the classes. Just too many screens, checkboxes and features. A complete bloatware. Buy MS doesn't take any feature off the app- if you have 1B users, most likely…

holy cow, I created an email for that - chengmauchengmau@gmail.com

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#326

Post by eropple »

ATsch wrote: post #232
_bxg1 wrote: post #209

Re: the original tweet JavaScript is a real language now. It's powerful and performant and uses modern paradigms, in addition to its sheer relevance. That said, I am glad I was taught using C++ in college. Not because I plan to ever write an OS or DBMS, but because it taught me valuable lessons about pointers, how memory is managed, how arrays and lists differ, and other computing fundamentals that still inform you w…

This is true, but people like the orginal tweeter often pretend that this learning order is somehow the only "real" way to do things. I don't see why it isn't equally as valid to learn high-level concepts first and then learn the gory details later. I'm confused why there seems to be such a large number of low-level people so stubbornly insisting their order is the right one.

From both my own experience and the experience of teaching people, those "gory details" are the nouns and verbs that compose higher-level abstractions. I haven't written C++ in anger in a decade, but it informs what I'm looking at when I'm reasoning through how V8 or the JVM is going to handle my code.

I've been required to teach people in the top-down manner that has left knowing gaps and rendered them without the tools necessary to solve their problems. That's not to say somebody who eagerly learns on one's own may be fine. Of course they might, so long as they have a way to determine what they need to learn. But most people don't eagerly learn on their own, and so a prescriptive "start at the bottom and build up" provides the necessary knowledge and grounding despite themselves.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#328

Post by zip1234 »

chandmk wrote: post #283

As a side note, Microsoft login echo system sucks big time in the context of office. You have no idea which URL to use to login to office 365. Between login/logout/timeout/other office apps/personal accounts/business accounts/forgot password workflows browser redirects to various URLs at least a dozen times. And you keep seeing new URLs I am wondering how less tech savvy people are coping with their authentication wo…

They recently improved this to make it easier. I think they realize that it can get pretty complicated.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#330

Post by neolefty »

trevorsg wrote: post #224
yitchelle wrote: post #214

Is this the "real" reason why they bought Github? They want to migrate their entire office products to use the ElectronJS. VisualCode and others were like the guinea pigs before going fully in with their office products. /end_speculation.

Not Electron. https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1006761134395834368

The tweet:

No they are not electron apps. They are compiled to native code.

It's now finally one toolchain(#webpack)

It's one codebase and it compiles to:

Web

Android

IOS

MacOS

UWP

WIN32 (only one that uses electron)

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