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IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

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Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#201

Post by Avalaxy »

alexggordon wrote: post #198
Avalaxy wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing this piece is missing is a better hardware platform, so I'm going to be very interested in seeing what Microsoft can produce in the coming months. Why? Honestly, I think the Surface tablets and Nokia's Lumia devices are really high quality.

I really think Microsoft could do a much better job at fostering a productive App development ecosystem, which is the heart of a good mobile operating system. My ability to use a mobile device hinges on an expectation of UI and Hardware, but a gold standard of an incredible App environment. Obviously, Apple has achieved this. Google Play has had some rough spots but is definitely a close second. Then there's the mort…

You're absolutely right, the WP appstore really has a lot less to offer than its competitors. It's really frustrating as a WP user to see companies ignoring WP all the time. Honestly, there is no good reason any more to leave WP out, there are multiple really solid cross platform development frameworks out there nowadays.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#202

Post by bunderbunder »

dionidium wrote: post #187
robertwharvey wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Stack Overflow is not a discussion forum. It is, in fact, quite the opposite. Think back; remember the time when you actually got usable, timely help on a forum? Can't think of any? I didn't think so. Why? Because forums are flooded with useless, mindless crap, like users who can't be bothered to form complete sentences, who can't be bothered to do fundamental research or learn the most basic skills of…

Make no mistake about it: SO's attention to broken windows was revolutionary. But the system is out of control. For example, comments are now silently deleted because, as one mod told me, SO "is about content, not people." Anybody who thinks a site that relies on volunteer contributions isn't about people is so far down the wrong path it's hard to know what to say to them.

Sadly, I think a site that relies on volunteers to maintain the community standards is doomed to go down that path.

The people who tend to rise in a site that's organized that way are people who devote the most time to volunteering for the site. And volunteering for the site means spending a lot of time reeeeaallllyy focused on a glowing screen. Meaning people who naturally rise to the top in such a community are people who've chosen to devote large portions of their free time to content, not people.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#203

Post by dionidium »

shagie wrote: post #195
mark-r wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the question. If it previously didn't have an answer or only had one, it goes to the top. If it had 5 OK answers and you add a 6th really awesome one, the ranking doesn't change much - expect it to be totally ignored.

That is not always the case. Consider http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/263542/ in which an answer was posted three years after the question was asked and two years since the last visible answer was posted ( http://programmers.stackexchange.com/posts/65281/timeline ) and is now the second highest answer in the question. That doesn't sound like 'totally ignored'.

It does happen. In fact, I think that a couple of my best (and highest-voted) answers are necromancers. However, I should note that the question you linked has 51464 views. And a lot of the questions I've earned necromancer for were similarly well-viewed. That's not typical. Most old questions get a fraction of those views.

Edit: In fact, I should admit that I usually only put the effort into answering old questions when it's something that has a lot of views. It's an indication that the question is linked somewhere prominent or is ranking well for some search terms. Those questions are worth putting the time in for. Most aren't.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#204

Post by jonathansampson »

teh_klev wrote: post #147
sliverstorm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft will almost certainly get the power to moderate their support section, no?

Nope, not at all. MSFT employees will have to earn reputation just like all the other users. I imagine there's already a few on the site that have gained the usual kinda privileges - vote to close, downvote, flagging etc. And there'll be non-MSFT users who'll be IE tag specialists and already familiar with what is considered an acceptable IE question to ask.

This is correct. We're normal users too. You can track my involvement at http://stackoverflow.com/users/54680/jonathan-sampson.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#205

Post by jonathansampson »

dfar1 wrote: post #30

"With over 40-thousand questions tagged "Internet Explorer", and dozens more asked every day, it has proven to be a great place to find reliable help." The announcement makes it seem that they are proud of how many questions are out there about IE issues.

I actually am proud :) It's awesome that people are asking their questions, and even more awesome that people are getting really solid answers. The significance of the 40k-question reference is that no matter what you run into, it's likely the answer already exists on Stack Overflow.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#206

Post by jonathansampson »

tkubacki wrote: post #148
ygra wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very poor question, indeed. And downvotes and the close doesn't surprise me. Hobo Sapiens' last comment actually details that quite well. I also wouldn't expect the dev team to comment on that at all. When they are able to share whether something is being done, then the status on the page will change, but before that they'll make no comments or commitment on anything.

Agreed on question part. Regarding IE itself: strongly disagree - marking most of new tech as "under consideration" is poor communication management at best - if they are not interested in sharing anything they should add another status. This is misleading.

We can have only so many statuses because it becomes difficult for even us to communicate in a meaningful way. "Under Consideration" means we're giving thought as to whether or not we will implement the feature, and when.

As for Web Components, we're actively discussing the related specs with other browser vendors, and trying to approach the topic as appropriately as is possible.

We certainly desire to be open and up-front; if you can identify ways in which we can improve our side of the discussion, we would love to know.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#208

Post by Perdition »

shagie wrote: post #185
Perdition wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get useful timely help from forums all the time. I find voting systems tend to squelch most of the idiots on technically focused forums.

The key difference though is that you got timely help from a forum by asking a question. However, as the next person trying to find the answer to the same question, I would have to wade through multiple forums with pages of answers (the answer you got was on page 3 of 5) with people asking clarification and the tangent from someone else (on page 2) about drivers I care nothing about. Stack Overflow was designed so th…

I only reach Stack Overflow from Google so its value to me in regulating answer quality is limited. The main thing it did for me was remove bad answer aggregators (expertsexchange and friends) from the front page of Google results.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#209

Post by tkubacki »

jonathansampson wrote: post #206
tkubacki wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on question part. Regarding IE itself: strongly disagree - marking most of new tech as "under consideration" is poor communication management at best - if they are not interested in sharing anything they should add another status. This is misleading.

We can have only so many statuses because it becomes difficult for even us to communicate in a meaningful way. "Under Consideration" means we're giving thought as to whether or not we will implement the feature, and when. As for Web Components, we're actively discussing the related specs with other browser vendors, and trying to approach the topic as appropriately as is possible. We certainly desire to be open and up…

I think IE status page lacks some kind of info (in status item details) You could make it more clear for devs whether some tech has your real attention or your message is "this is ok but don't invest you time in it - we will not implement this in next 30 yrs"

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#210

Post by kmdev »

Avalaxy wrote: post #201
alexggordon wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think Microsoft could do a much better job at fostering a productive App development ecosystem, which is the heart of a good mobile operating system. My ability to use a mobile device hinges on an expectation of UI and Hardware, but a gold standard of an incredible App environment. Obviously, Apple has achieved this. Google Play has had some rough spots but is definitely a close second. Then there's the mort…

You're absolutely right, the WP appstore really has a lot less to offer than its competitors. It's really frustrating as a WP user to see companies ignoring WP all the time. Honestly, there is no good reason any more to leave WP out, there are multiple really solid cross platform development frameworks out there nowadays.

Tradeoffs (and I'm sure I'm mostly preaching to the choir). Generally, for non-trivial mobile apps, you want to try and build native versions for Android/iOS first. Frameworks that are cross-platform just aren't up to par in many aspects (again, for non trivial apps). While you may be able to get performance close enough to native performance with a cross-platform framework, you're still going to be spending a significant amount of time on the UI/UX side customizing to ensure your app's look, feel and general flow line up with the standards and best practices for that platform. This is not a trivial concern. Facebook found that out the hard way on Android as one example. Users learn and form muscle memory on the platform they choose to invest in and respond very poorly if your app doesn't deliver a UI/UX that adheres nicely to the platform standards. Another concern, which is being addressed, but is going to be an ongoing concern for still some time, is API feature access on each platform. Cross-platform frameworks are continually playing catch-up to try implement access to the most important new API additions on each platform. The gap has certainly been shortened, especially in the location services area but ultimately, there won't be API access parity across platforms for quite some time and it will still lag behind the native implementations.

Again, this is all in general, applies the most to bigger apps and/or apps that rely heavily on fast performance or access to specific native APIs and based on one mobile devs experience.

It is exciting to see that for most things that are somewhere between a blog and a small to non-trivial application, just focusing on making sure your site/small app works well on most mobile browsers is sufficient. You can also usually wrap things up in each platforms' version of a WebView if you want to get your app/site listed on each store for that extra exposure. Again though, you have to be very careful doing that for the same UI/UX concerns mentioned earlier.

Getting away from the more technical aspects, just looking at WP market share vs Android/iOS means that even if a business wants to hit every platform, they're still going to start with iOS/Android and making sure they have a good mobile site experience before looking at WP. Add in the cost of finding a dev to work on your WP build (or assigning one from another team to it) and you end up with only the largest entities having the man-power and expertise to be able to justify a priority list that includes executing nice implementations across all platforms, including WP.

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