Fascinating - not at all the response I expected, and pleasantly [save one statement] surprising at that.
I seriously hope I'm over-estimating the work required to pull off the relatively small add-on I'm considering creating, but the overall effect of the past five days' research tells me I'm not - that it'll take me a month or two of heads-down effort most nights and weekends to come out with a usable and reasonably pretty implementation of that functionality. If I was going to do something similar in WinForms or even in a VSTO add-on, I wouldn't expect it to take even half that time - but all this "you've got a lot of reading to do, and a lot of new terminology, new language/'framework' and relatively net-new technology to create
any non-trivial VMC add-on" talk has got me real scared by this point. Hardly a compelling platform for developers with an itch to scratch, and should still give pause to those who're looking to make $$ from possible market opportunities.
Charlie:
In a nutshell, your app should *never* rely on the fact it can have a
custom Start Menu strip. In fact, it should assume it does NOT to
correctly conform to the intent and purpose for custom Start Menu
strips. I'm not sure we have effectively communicated exactly how
custom Start Menu strips should be leveraged -- I'll try to rectify
that situation soon.
I sure as heck don't get why an app should *never* rely on custom Start Menu strips - and believe me, that's one of the things that I twigged on real early in this research, and tried valiantly to determine what circumstances generally warrant this approach vs. the other (?) approaches.
Do you have a list of the different approaches that developers could take advantage of? Could you publish that (not just buried in the SDK, but also on sites like this where dev's will more likely turn first for design-level decision guidance) along with a comparison of the *developer* and *end user* benefits and drawbacks for each? Ideally there ought to be a decision tree that helps guide the developer down the path that most closely suits their customers' requirements, their constraints and their skill sets. If there are examples of each, point to them to give us concrete ways of putting these comparisons in context.
It sure seems to me that you've seen how developers can get headed down the wrong path, and any of those that have been repeated are likely to keep naturally manifesting themselves in the absence of clear guidance to the contrary.
Charlie:
...of course, if you aren't working on the product with the *complete* information on the input to the decision it may appear so...
Charlie, I just gotta ask: what is it you want us to think in response to this statement? I think it's pretty safe to say that no one would delude themselves into thinking they know everything the product teams know -- hell, considering how often I've seen 'softies use this same line with their customers, it's hard to imagine there's anyone who *hasn't* had this point beaten into them by now.
While I never had the opportunity to work directly with your team, I did have plenty of opportunities (as an old-school MCS consultant, as a Redmond-based EBC speaker and as a member of the Solutions Accelerator team) to observe and participate in decisions on product features, directions & scenarios. In my experience there were a few such decisions that made no sense without every single bit of information that played into them; however, the vast majority boiled down to one or two (a) terribly influential customers, (b) compelling [though not necessarily rational or defensible] pieces of data, or (c) aggressive table-bangers. Most such decisions made some amount of sense, without knowing every single detail that went into them.
So this begs the question: what was so special about this situation that makes it impossible to understand by anyone except those privileged few who were in the room at the time the decision was made? And if it's true that no one outside the room could ever hope to understand the decision/outcome, how is it possible for that decision/outcome to really benefit *any* of those outside that select group of insiders?
Cheers and thanks as always,
Mike