New Channel 9 ​Architectur​e: What do you want to know?

Charles will be chatting with me on Monday around 11am about the architecture behind the new Channel 9. If you have any questions for me, post them here and we'll go thru the thread during the video and talk about them.

I can also answer quick questions here in the thread both before and after the video.

MasterPie said:

Ajax officially dead from the site?

Markup is generally puke-worthy on sites that have complicated architecture...if W3bbo viewed the source, would he cringe (or produce a one page soliloquy)? Is it standards compliant (for the most part)?

Can you give a quick rundown of frameworks and technologies used...and maybe a summary of why you chose one vs another? I know, at least for me, it's confusing trying to choose between similar MS technologies and frameworks.

Do you mean "not tabbed and formatted" bad markup or "non-standards compliant, bad use of certain tags" bad markup?

MasterPie said:

Sampy said:

*snip*

Bad use of tags. Less W3C errors.

 

Actually, I take that back...I care more about it looking and behaving the same across browsers and performing well than it passing a compliance test.

We have pretty much the same metric.

rhm said:

Is there any mechanism for getting notified when someone has replied to you on a thread? I'm thinking particularly of video comments - you make a comment, but you've got no idea if someone's replied (or added a comment for any other reason) unless you keep going back and checking. The forums are a bit different because changed threads rise to the top, but even there, if you don't check back for a while a thread could have gone off the front page and you might not see a reply on a thread you were 'involved' in. Something like the Facebook notifications would be nice.

There isn't. This is the top of my 'most wanted' list for features to work on after the release though. We'll be providing a place to discuss new features and bugs though, and hopefully it will include voting on these new features.

Personally I'd like to have notification via email, with the option of a daily digest or individual messages.

MasterPie said:

Ajax officially dead from the site?

Markup is generally puke-worthy on sites that have complicated architecture...if W3bbo viewed the source, would he cringe (or produce a one page soliloquy)? Is it standards compliant (for the most part)?

Can you give a quick rundown of frameworks and technologies used...and maybe a summary of why you chose one vs another? I know, at least for me, it's confusing trying to choose between similar MS technologies and frameworks.

MasterPie said:

Ajax officially dead from the site?

Bad Ajax is dead. Good Ajax is still around *where appropriate*, clicking on a star rating value for example uses Ajax to store your rating (no need for a post back for something very 'inline' like that)

Ian2 said:

How much of an API is there? (thinking about the WP7 project)

Pretty much none beyond RSS. That's why Duncan wanted you guys to focus on UX and features for the WP7 app: we need to know what you guys need before we just start building stuff.

Don't take over this thread with that list though, we're following the other thread about it and the wiki.

ManipUni said:

Are you making the entire thing a lot more simple so it works a lot more often? Or are you just putting more complexity on top of the existing complexity?

 

PS - I really need to re-register at some stage. I'm tired of this account name.

It's a full rewrite and the code is much, much smaller and much more simple. I'll get into this more in the video but it's a very flat, very simple system. I even remove some levels of the default ASP.Net pipeline to get it even smaller.

Sven Groot said:

Duncanma said:

*snip*

Gee, I remember when C9v4 was being touted as the clean slate. You said no, we won't fix the problems in v3, and we won't add the features you want, because we're working on C9v4, and that is much better and will allow to quickly add the things you're asking for. Like an ignore list, which was at that time one of the most requested features and something that would surely be implemented on the new, flexible C9v4.

 

Excuse me for being a cynic, but what guarantees do we have that this isn't just history repeating itself? This site has such a long history of broken promises it's hard to get excited about any claims made by the team regarding site capabilities to be added at a later date.

Honestly, the best we can do is show you rather than tell you. I can tell you that it feels like a much easier codebase to add to and to modify but the time in preview and the first few months after release will tell the tale.

Sven Groot said:

Duncanma said:

*snip*

Gee, I remember when C9v4 was being touted as the clean slate. You said no, we won't fix the problems in v3, and we won't add the features you want, because we're working on C9v4, and that is much better and will allow to quickly add the things you're asking for. Like an ignore list, which was at that time one of the most requested features and something that would surely be implemented on the new, flexible C9v4.

 

Excuse me for being a cynic, but what guarantees do we have that this isn't just history repeating itself? This site has such a long history of broken promises it's hard to get excited about any claims made by the team regarding site capabilities to be added at a later date.

Sven Groot said:

Excuse me for being a cynic, but what guarantees do we have that this isn't just history repeating itself? This site has such a long history of broken promises it's hard to get excited about any claims made by the team regarding site capabilities to be added at a later date.

Good point. I wasn't actually going to mention any future features for exactly that reason. Feel free to doubt (or completely ignore) until you see something.

Duncanma said:

Sven Groot said:

*snip*

 

Good point. I wasn't actually going to mention any future features for exactly that reason. Feel free to doubt (or completely ignore) until you see something.

All fair points folks. One of the things we did with this release was we set the right level of process, built a plan and executed against it.

We planned the user experience, built it with informed data on how people use Channel 9.

We planned the development process so that we could ship with quality.

We thought through the types of additions we'll need to make to the site and how can we architect it simple enough so it is not hard to add features.

We made decisions on what needs to stay and what needs to go (e.g. like the Wiki is moving to Florida and retiring)

It also meant ground breaking stuff for us like actually having a test team outside of our devs testing the code for bugs and performance. We embraced unit tests with over 1300+ for the site. We brought new skillsets into the team with Geoff and  Cara that are Javascript, HTML/CSS Ninja's (a competency we needed more of on the team) so I am sure you'll be pleased with our markup. Also Nishant who is well versed in UX to go through the design, information architecture. We did not set an arbritrary date to ship, although we have had proper scrum/sprint plans and what the min bar is to ship and the criteria to exit those milestones.

We build a plan around the data, experience and have been executing.

Very different than before. Time will tell and with your feedback if this has been worthwhile. I am obviously biased, but am excited.

Duncan's team has been able to focus pretty much 100% on this new Channel 9 without them being taken off to work on event sites and we've reduced the number of sites (no more C8, C10) that they need to maintain so they can focus on our truly favorite child 9.

There's a lot to this release beyond the UX in we've reingeneered how we build and run C9.

We bring the new site up for you on Tuesday take the time to step back and go through and give us your feedback.

Thank you again for all the time you spend here on C9.

-Jeff

vesuvius said:

How many Patterns & Practices libraries have you used?

 

Are you aware that the whole world and it's aunt is now using smartphones and ipads so how easy is the site to use in mobile mode?

As an iPad owner, I've made sure it works great.

We need to fix a tinymce issue that it has on mobile safari (you can't get the caret into the window) but other than that it works awesome.

We have more mobile work to do to make that it's awesome on phones but once you see the preview, try it from your phone and let us know.