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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

#371
post #312
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if somebody writes in Objective C, the C parts don't make it C.

They do. Objective C is a superset of C.

C++ used to be a superset of C too before they diverged, but Objective C and C++ are/were viewed, correctly, as different languages from the same family.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#372

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…

I wonder at what point the number of domains and subdomains that you can log into becomes its own phishing vector. At least with most services, you can look in the URL and pretty quickly know whether or not you're in the right place!

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#373
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually at one point they went very close to replace VBA with .net. It was called VSTA and meant to be a mini visual studio in office apps. I believe one of the office apps shipped with it in Office 2007, then they killed it.

VSTO, right?

Nope. VSTO actually shipped and is used to create office addins. VSTA was an embedded IDE.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#374
post #143

One Day Microsoft made VSCode and everyone loves them. The Second day Microsoft decide to buy GitHub and everyone were flocking off to Gitlab, everyone hates them. Now they are moving to the biblical end of computing era by making every Javascript. May be they will even Open Source the Windows Kernel some day.

May be they will even Open Source the Windows Kernel some day.

Only after they have rewritten it in JavaScript.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#375
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you know this, but for the GP or anyone else: "Dynamically typed" doesn't mean "strongly typed". Python and Ruby are strongly typed, JS is weakly typed.

Yeah, went for the "picture is worth a thousand words" approach to explaining the distinction :)

and yet you still managed to misunderstand the point :)

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#376
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 rewrote a 3000 line VBA function into C# earlier this year for a Oil/Gas company. It was surprisingly easy. Sometimes tedious, but easy. It runs faster, it's easier to maintain and now they can slap whatever front-end they want on it. Is it money, fear or gatekeeping that keeps these VBA programs untouchable?

It's simply that the people doing the development only get to use VBA. Not that having a chemical engineer teach themself C# over their lunch break is going to turn out great software...

Having worked at a big company as a mechanical engineer and produced a few crappy VBA apps, I did it because it would take significantly more time and effort to get approval for an IT project, than to learn VBA and do it myself.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#377

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…

Heaven help you if you have multiple accounts. Logging in and out remains dicey after all these years.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#378
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite thing I noticed recently; if you buy a book on the Microsoft Store and open it in a web browser, the url is hosted on zune.net. What year is this?!

Oh it gets better. If you look at the appx package names for "Groove music" and a couple others they're still Microsoft.Zune prefixed

Appx package names seem almost entirely uninteresting and most consumers will never look at them. Why would anyone bother changing them?

Disclosure: Microsoft employee, but not on Groove (or anything related to appx packages for that matter)

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#379

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…

It's a huge problem for MS login flows and Google's login flows. As they absorbed various disparate products with various logins and tried to force a unified login flow on all of them they end up with a mess.

For Google, see the very many failings here: https://grumpy.website/post/0PU1U2r3v. Someone (me?) should do the same for MS.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#380
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often wish we could just fork off the modern web and redo things the right way.

If you figure out how to build a cross-platform application distribution mechanism that is better than the modern web, please do let us know!

I sure will.

The challenge here is social. The Web has fist-mover advantage. Also, I fear that doing it the right way would be equivalent to forcing standardization on a single operating system (or a family of systems).

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