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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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean JavaScript not Office 365 right? They are working on compiling C# to Web Assembly FYI.

IE11 will never support wasm, so I suspect wasm isn't their first choice eh

This is a good point. MS has agreed to support IE11 until 2025. I'm not sure if that means they have an internal mandate that Office 365 must work with IE11, but I wouldn't be surprised. Those poor poor MS developers.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#352
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.

Why at all? I would expect, long term, the ideal solution for a “run in browser” solution would be WebAssembly, possibly with JavaScript glue to the DOM. If so, they probably can keep large paths of their existing code base. Also, I expect the existing code base isn’t small, so a rewrite won’t be ready soon. That makes cross-compiling from whatever they have now to WebAssembly or JavaScript seem even better options.

Well TFA is about a big-time rewrite of Office into JavaScript, so at least MS doesn't appear to see any perspective in WASM.

Considering they are uniquely positioned to make it happen given their C# buy-in and probably more than just a bit of existing software to leverage, I'd say this is as strong a signal of non-endorsement as it gets.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#353
post #301

Most of the comments seems to say "it's a bad idea" , keep in mind Microsoft is now using React very intensively for most of their projects as well as angular (VSCode , Windows Server etc... ) Meaning it's not the language the real issue , it's what you do with it. Also Junior at school are less and less trained with Java and C# but straight up with JS or PHP , so it will be much easier to integrate juniors on this r…

Mail is one of the key parts of the internet no offence you don't want someone straight out some boot camp of dubious provenance having any input into what language or the spec of a MUA or MTA. Any new developers on this need to have experience working with email standards and a good knowledge of C++ / C not some fracking scripting language! And as some one who used to do international interconnect I think I have som…

This is literally the same argument of the tweet's first poster (to which the linked tweet is a reply). This is just simply not true. I know many people who make mail apps for some big big companies. They have CS degrees and would admit they suck at C++ (I wouldn't even mention C) but they are great at Python

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#355
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?

Most of them aren't maintained by technical people. Someone wrote some excel file years ago and every month it's copy pasted and the new data put in place of the old and it usually works until it doesn't.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#356

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…

The way I see it, even saying that this is the goal is bad news. It's basically an official admission that Microsoft intends to abandon the Desktop OS entirely. Windows 10's bullshit isn't just some bump in the road that would eventually be recognized as the bad idea that it is, it's a deliberate move to push people off of Windows Desktop and on to Windows tablets, smartphones, and a desktop web kiosk. Windows as a personal computing Desktop OS would be completely dead, and given the state of the alternatives that means that personal computing desktops are also dead. Everything will be a web kiosk or a console.

It's pretty much exactly the scenario of my nightmares.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#357
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not wrong, see the Windows 10 OneNote app for example, which already uses Typescript on WinRT/UWP. An Electron target will only be for legacy platforms, like Windows 7 and 8. Also see https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/office-365/161295/microsoft-r...

It's interesting they're using Electron for Win7/Win8 when React Native for Windows has a WPF rendered that works nicely on Win7 and 8. Perhaps they just found that maintaining two slightly different RN office apps for Windows wasn't worth the effort given the declining market share of the older Windows versions.

So much for "learn once, write anywhere".

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#358
post #345

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…

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

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#360

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 often go to outlook 365 to view mail and it logs me out. No reason. I didn't go to the logout url. Just logs me out. Happens almost every day now. Sometimes I get a content corrupted error. I have no idea what that even means and I've been doing web development for over a decade. There are at least two ways to reset your password and they each have different, incompatible password requirements with each other. And finally, I'm asked to change my password constantly and to follow stupid password rules as if my random 32 character string needs rotating. If this is the new Microsoft, it's just like the old Microsoft: absolute fucking shit. Garbage that now spies on us. We switched to MS email from zoho, a system that looks like it was last updated in the 90's and it's an absolute total disaster in comparison. I guess they're too busy rewriting everything badly in Javascript to care about actual, real user and UI issues, however. That's another stupid idea in of itself, but since I'm using a version of Office that no longer even gets security updates, it's irrelevant as I will likely never upgrade. If this is the changed Microsoft, I prefer 90's Microsoft. At least they didn't pretend they were something they were not, nor pretend like they actually care about users or developers, something they clearly don't.
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