Rico Mariani: Visual Studio Today, Tomorrow and Beyond - Your Questions Answered

The Discussion

• 

  822MB for the iPod format? You're kidding right? And I was like downloading the iPod RSS feed via the iTunes Podcast feature (as I do ost of the time) to watch it tomorrow before school on my nano... hm nah... not this time
  I have like 700MB free on it, that's normally enough for like 3 hours of video... what bitrate are you guys using to encode your videos to MP4? 384kbps video and 96kbps for audio is plenty enough and needs about 1-2MB per minute, oh and as a sidenote, how about normalizing the audio stream to use all the virtually available 16 bits per sample? Audio is really silent on an iPod. With full volume I don't understand anything when there's people talking around me and I'm listening to those people in the video.
  
  Hm... maybe I better should have put that in the Feedback forum... but, yeah, too late :\

• 

  Interesting. The low bit rate WMV file for this interview comes in at 223 MB. I'm not sure why the MP4 is so large... I'll ask the people who do know.
  
  C

• 

  I am not angry you guys. Seriously.
  
  I try to stay up to date with Wix but it's far from ready yet. I can't create dialogs in a designer, intellisense gives html garbage on top of the Wix tags, the latest version 3.0 is still in beta and in the end I have to type too much to get a basic result.
  
  You can find the wix project on Sourceforge. I couldn't find anything about Wix on Codeplex.
  
  I created a demo which uses Wix. You can find it on: http://home.scarlet.be/~zippyv/zippydemo/

• 

  only at 22:00 but just a quick comment, isn't the framework already sort of componentized? its all different assemblies and you don't load em all at once so its not like we're loading the entire framework perhaps there should be more granularity in the framework assembles, but still, the foundation is there
  

• 

  yay im on c9
  with a billion questions but still
  great to hear about the mef stuff not being able to mash together several "left margins" together is great
  
  it is "Al", short for allan btw
  sorry for the smileys, i'm from the msn generation, what can i say
  
  --edit--
  
  another quick comment, great stuff about the help system :O one huge pain for me is having to go look in a chm file with that so-nineties-viewer.. it would be really great if you could get chm files into (the equivalent of) dexplore, or if that's not possible, make chm equivalents that go in there. fromfrmo what rico is saying that sounds possible id love more info on that
  
  --edit2--
  great interview (as always) are there more vs interviews on the way? ias a general note it would be awesomeawsome to have like a schedule of what c9 videos are in the works and whats planned   (of course sanitized for thing that are still secret)
  

• 

  Another great interview Charles. I know we all have our personal wish lists for the product many of which will conflict, but it's good to know that Rico will be there in the future searching for the path forward. Speaking personally I can't think of a cooler job than to be in the software tooling industry. You folks get to enable human creativity, that's simultaneously a heck of a responsibility and way cool.

• 

  At first I thought "Man, Charles, that's a bit harsh constantly cutting him off like that." but in the end it was still over an hour worth of interview.
  
  Great video, very informative.
  

• 

  Many thanks Rico for taking time out of your frenetic schedule and spending some time with the "niners". We all feel humbled, elated and immensely proud. Also thanks to Charles for making this all happen, it makes one proud to be a niner.
  

• 

  Yes. Thanks Charles and Rico for this interview. I'd really love to see more of these niner-contributed interviews. I think they are really informative and to be able to get our questions and concerns answered like this is just awesome.
  
  Again... an awesome and informative interview.
  

• 

  Nice interview, thanks.
  
  I regret not asking this question though: since MEF is so young, how did the VS team deal with that? I guess the development of VS2010 started a while before the first alfa version of MEF was even available. Do they have a different extensibility model that they are slowly replacing? Will there be more extensibility models for VS2010 or will MEF be the only one?
  
  Rico also mentioned the "UX team" - did he refer to the MS-wide UX team that does work on Office, Windows and supposadly many other products or does Visual Studio have its own dedicated UX team? I would be very excited to hear that. BTW, I consider VS very visually pleasing - for instance, the Class Designer is so much nicer than any other UML I've worked with that I always thought there must be some talented designers working on VS.
  
  Thanks again for the interview, Charles and Rico.
  

• 

  We wanted to get through all the questions and, as you can tell, dear Rico has no difficulty with articulating his thoughts!
  C

• 

  I am consistently... surprise is not the right word... inspired... hmmm not sure... what I am trying to say that MS employees are a VEYR SMART bunch of people. I am a total novice at programming so may this has something to do with it but all the video interviews I see here are AMAZING even if I dont understand most of it!

• 

  I'm still seeing the Silverlight player..
  

• 

  It surprises me you haven't started to shoot videos in HD or in wide screen at least.

  I just watched this interview again since VS2010 beta was released, and it really makes me wonder why the dev team for VS said no to the ribbon.  I can think of two major areas this would help, designers and refactoring.  Hunting for menu commands isn't fun and by the time you've found it (usually with Google's help) you've been distracted enough that your train of thought is lost.  Wasn't that one of the goals of the Office Ribbon, was to make features that would normally be hidden and put them front and center when a user action demanded their attention.

  The one feature I was looking forward but wasn't able to find yet is workspace scaling.  The same thing that Blend has.

• 

  This guy is brilliant. Thanks for making us discover him and I am glad that part of VS future is in his hands.

• 

  i seem to be having a problem with all the videos i downloaded here yesterday! I downloaded wmvs and they play only audio with KMPlayer, they don't play at all with meda player and VLC plays the audio fine but the video all garbled!! I'm not downloading theMP4 versions but would you guys have an idea of what is going on? Or if i need some codecs installed!? Thanks so much!!