MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?
-
Can this be true? I doubt this very much. Office has tons of legacy features, COM APIs, plugin architecture etc. and a YUUUGE C/C++ codebase AFAIK
On the other hand if he's just talking about the "mobile" version (the one that's in the Store) it can kind of make sense.
-
@marczellm Office 365 is website, so by necessity it must be in JS (or compiled to JS). Skype has been a browser-disguised-as-app for quite some time already. VSCode is made in Node. Never heard of MS Teams or that other thing.
-
@marczellm I don't doubt it about Skype though. Most other Electron software is 'yeah, we know our platform is shitty, but we can transcend that with intelligent design', like Discord or VS Code. Skype is 'let's not rock the boat here'.
-
@gąska said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Office 365 is website
Later down the tweet thread he says they use React Native to compile to all platforms.
-
Okay so it might be that the UI (ribbon, homescreen etc.) is rewritten around the C++ core.
The next version of Microsoft Office will feature new Fluent Design experiences
Microsoft is bringing its Fluent Design experience to the next version of Microsoft Office desktop apps and the web.
-
@marczellm I think you might be confusing Office with Office 365.
-
@marczellm So they're changing the ribbon to start minimized, so that we just see the text? Ok cool, we're almost back a full circle to menus and a toolbar, hehe :-D
-
@gąska said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
@marczellm I think you might be confusing Office with Office 365.
I think it is confusing its own developers then.
Because if I pay for an Office 365 subscription I get
- various cloud services (OneDrive etc.)
- including Office Online
- desktop Office suite
So Office 365 includes Office.
This guy on twitter is talking about how they are going to use a single codebase that will be compiled from JS to native on all platforms. Which means it's not just the website.
- various cloud services (OneDrive etc.)
-
@marczellm said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Fluent Design experiences
What just happened:
: I don't know what a 'fluent design experience' is, but I'm pretty sure I don't want it.(morbid curiosity takes over)
: https://fluent.microsoft.com/
: Yup, positive I don't want it if it does that to innocent web pages.(Then I hit Wikipedia.)
: The system is based on five key components: Light, Depth, Motion, Material, and Scale.
: OMG no, please no, please just kill me now.
-
@ixvedeusi It doesn't suck per se, it's just 'we make apps this way and you should too!!1' just like Material Design. It's also targeted more at applications than at websites.
-
@gąska said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Never heard of MS Teams
Basically it's renamed "Skype for Business".
-
@ixvedeusi said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
The system is based on five key components: Light, Depth, Motion, Material, and Scale.
Pretty sure Fluent Design is a video game engine.
-
@ixvedeusi Essentially it continues the trend where somebody thought that text was scary and producing actual informative content too difficult. So, if you remove all text, and consequently most if not all useful information, you end up with whatever that is.
Besides, I'm viewing that webpage (fluent.microsoft.com) on a desktop with i8700K and a GTX1080 (this is admittedly somewhat offset by the use of firefox), so how did they manage to make the scrolling that janky and non-smooth? It's just a couple of bloody images.
-
@cheong said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
@gąska said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Never heard of MS Teams
Basically it's renamed "Skype for Business".
Not really. It’s more “Microsoft’s Slack clone”. While the intent is that it will replace Skype for Business, it does have new added features (persistent chats!); it’s not just Office Communicator Rebrand #3.
-
@el-dorko said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
@marczellm So they're changing the ribbon to start minimized, so that we just see the text? Ok cool, we're almost back a full circle to menus and a toolbar, hehe :-D
Little-known feature: If you double-click the ribbon menu, it collapses down to text until it's clicked.
edit: you have to double click it in the text labels region along the top of the ribbon.
-
@unperverted-vixen
Persistent chats are not a new feature to Teams, they've existed since Lync Server 2010.They're just not really on by default and hidden like 3 menus deep so most administrators never even know they're there, much less set them up. And Teams definitely goes a lot further toward the Slack side of allowing regular users to create persistent chats, improved organization of chat channels, etc etc etc.
-
@izzion said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
And Teams definitely goes a lot further toward the Slack side of being extremely buggy and janky
-
@izzion said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
They're just not really on by default and hidden like 3 menus deep
That's a common thing with so much of MS's software.
most administrators never even know they're there, much less set them up
And that characterises a lot of the rest of it. Good features, but disabled because some administrator (with no real commitment to supporting you) either doesn't know about it or doesn't figure that the minor inconvenience to them is outweighed by the importance to your team.
I still remember our Sharepoint admin instructing our scientists to not organise their data in ways he hadn't thought of or didn't approve of; folders were banned — to keep path lengths in IIS short — and the only metadata tagging allowed was that which he'd configured, and that had effectively only one tag that could be used that applied to everything that we were doing and so added no value at all. All of which went down like a lead balloon; I believe we managed to stay polite while the guy was in the room, but the general attitude was “why did you waste 90 minutes of our time telling us about all this shit?” ;)
-
I wonder if perhaps they're going with some sort of emscripten-like approach where they can compile most of the original C and C++ code to JavaScript and only have to port a still large but relatively small subset of it?
-
@gąska MSTEAMS is Visual Studio Team Services, I think.
-
Praise be Jeff Atwood, the law is coming into force in big time now.
-
@nagesh Nope.
SourceSafe => Team Foundation => Visual Studio Team Services => Visual Studio Online
Live Communications Server => Office Communications Server => Lync => Skype for Business => Teams (chat)
Groove (file sync) => SharePoint Workspaces => OneDrive for Business => Teams (documents)
Zune => Xbox Audio => Groove Music => Spotify
Windows Live Mesh => Windows Live SkyDrive => SkyDrive => OneDrive
-
@twelvebaud said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Windows Live Mesh => Windows Live SkyDrive => SkyDrive => OneDrive
Windows Live Mesh (formerly known as Windows Live FolderShare, Live Mesh, and Windows Live Sync)
-
@gąska Yep, the chain does go backwards from Live Mesh; I started there because that's when I started using it personally (Windows Mobile support).
-
@marczellm said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Can this be true?
Yes; in fact it's obvious. But there's an important point you're missing: Office 365 is not Office. They're two different products. Office 365 is the online component.
To which you're probably asking, "wait a minute, wasn't it JavaScript before?" Believe it or not, no. It was in .NET and cross-compiled to JavaScript using some weird wonky cross-compiler. (If you dive into the
windowobject on Office 365 using your browser's debugger you can see the whole .NET namespace there. It's pretty weird/cool.)The other question I'm asking is, "does this include the back-end"?
(And the other obvious one is, "by JavaScript, you mean TypeScript, right?" Because I'm 99.5% sure they do.)
@marczellm said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Office has tons of legacy features, COM APIs, plugin architecture etc.
New plugins are in JavaScript. JS plugins run in both Office 365 and desktop Office.
@marczellm said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
On the other hand if he's just talking about the "mobile" version (the one that's in the Store) it can kind of make sense.
...? No, it says "Office 365" right there in the tweet. I don't know what the mobile versions are written in.
-
@marczellm said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
This guy on twitter is talking about how they are going to use a single codebase that will be compiled from JS to native on all platforms. Which means it's not just the website.
Yeah; he's full of shit. That's not going to happen.
He probably means native to all platforms except Windows and OS X.
If Microsoft does throw away every business customer that currently relies on the COM API or VBA scripting, they will be committing business suicide. There is no way that will happen. (At best, they'll deliver both versions side-by-side. But there's no way in HELL they're not going to be delivering the COM/C++ version for years to come.)
-
@cheong said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Basically it's renamed "Skype for Business".
God I wish. Skype has some redeeming features.
Teams is "buggy shit Slack ripoff which crashes every time you sleep your laptop".
-
@twelvebaud said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Visual Studio Team Services => Visual Studio Online
These two exist simultaneously.
VSTS is their corprorate version.
Visual Studio Online is their Github clone.
(Think "paid Github" vs. "Github". The former contains a lot of build and release tools the latter doesn't have, unless they've been added recently.)
-
@blakeyrat Last I was aware, TFS is on-prem (GitHub Enterprise) while VSTS/VSO is online (GitHub, free and paid), and they ended up killing off TFS' build and release system and replacing it with a different one that's free in TFS but requires additional licensing in VSO.
-
@twelvebaud Your post confuses me.
I don't think TFS exists anymore, does it? (Except in legacy on-premises installs, naturally.) It's all VSTS now. VSTS can be on-premises or hosted.
@twelvebaud said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
while VSTS/VSO is online (GitHub, free and paid)
VSTS is the paid version; VSO is the free version. If you pay for VSO you get VSTS. That's my understanding.
@twelvebaud said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
and they ended up killing off TFS' build and release system and replacing it with a different one that's free in TFS but requires additional licensing in VSO.
I'll just take your word for that one because I don't know.
EDIT: I know this all sounds confusing, but it's still 500 times more simple than figuring out Google's chat/IM/SMS strategy.
-
@blakeyrat I just checked to make sure, and here's the best guess I can make of it:
- The software that runs all this is Team Foundation.
- If you install it on-prem, it's Team Foundation Server.
- If you use it hosted, it's Visual Studio Team Services.
- There's no fundamental difference software-wise between TFS and VSTS besides update cadence and BI integration (TFS uses SQL Reports, VSTS uses PowerBI).
- Visual Studio Online used to be branding for VSTS, but is now gone.
Amen about Google's communication platform strategy. It feels like it's mired in the bowels of marketing and being digested by a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers.
-
@twelvebaud said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Amen about Google's communication platform strategy. It feels like it's mired in the bowels of marketing and being digested by a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers.
Well this Visual Studio "what he fuck is the name of the online tools?" thing is almost as bad.
I don't know why tech companies are so fucking awful at branding. It's like the easiest thing about running a business that sells products.
Have you ever seen anybody confused over the difference between Frosted Flakes and Corn Flakes? Somehow fucking Kellogg's makes this work. Why can't Google or Microsoft?
-
@blakeyrat said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
If Microsoft does throw away every business customer that currently relies on the COM API or VBA scripting, they will be committing business suicide. There is no way that will happen.
Alternatively, they could spend billions on getting COM and VBA supported flawlessly by the Javascript version.
-
@gąska said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Alternatively, they could spend billions on getting COM and VBA supported flawlessly by the Javascript version.
Why would you spend millions of man-hours rewriting debugged code that works? Microsoft is a lot of things, but they aren't stupid.
-
@blakeyrat they're already rewriting entirety of .Net. I wouldn't write off any stupid idea at this point.
-
@gąska said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
they're already rewriting entirety of .Net.
Nah; in true open source fashion they're skipping the hard bits, like
System.Drawingand just redoing the easy bits.
-
@blakeyrat and I'm sure their attempt at supporting VBA would be just as half-assed.
-
@blakeyrat said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
@cheong said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Basically it's renamed "Skype for Business".
God I wish. Skype has some redeeming features.
Teams is "buggy shit Slack ripoff which crashes every time you sleep your laptop".
how could it crash ? it runs on some one else's PC.
-
@nagesh said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
how could it crash ? it runs on some one else's PC.
The server doesn't crash (well, presumably, I didn't have access to it), the client did.
-
@blakeyrat is correct. office365 is not full bloated version of office.
-
@blakeyrat said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
@marczellm said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
This guy on twitter is talking about how they are going to use a single codebase that will be compiled from JS to native on all platforms. Which means it's not just the website.
Yeah; he's full of shit. That's not going to happen.
Most probable explanation.
Although do you think that the UI of desktop Office could be rewritten (or incorporate stuff written) in JS? There's this video that I posted earlier about them planning to use the same Fluent UI and animations on Office web and desktop. I'm thinking maybe the core of Office stays the same, but the new shiny UI parts will be in React Native or whatever.
@blakeyrat said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
Office 365 is not Office. They're two different products. Office 365 is the online component
This is very confusing branding (again), because if you buy Office 365 you get Office too. In fact Office 365 is, if I read this correctly, both the alternative name of Office Online, as well as the name of one kind of Office licence that you can buy, the subscription kind. The other kind is the own-one-version-forever and it's called Office 2016.
-
@marczellm Well yeah and if you buy a used minivan the dealer gives you a free camera, that doesn't mean the minivan and camera are the same product.
-
@blakeyrat said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
@marczellm Well yeah and if you buy a used minivan the dealer gives you a free camera, that doesn't mean the minivan and camera are the same product.
Bad analogy. You don't buy a minivan if you just want to take pictures. Office 365 is advertised as the main way to get Office.
-
@anotherusername There's also typically an arrow icon on the top right of the ribbon that does this.
-
Also, I wonder if they're planning to go full PWA with things now, since that would get them off electron.
-
@marczellm said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
This is very confusing branding (again)
Remember, this is the same company that decided to name the third Xbox "Xbox One".
-
@magus said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
@anotherusername There's also typically an arrow icon on the top right of the ribbon that does this.
Has it always been there? I feel like they snuck it in at some point because the double-click thing wasn't discoverable enough.
-
@anotherusername I don't know, but it's certainly been there since Office 2010... and it's in Explorer, Paint, and Wordpad too.
I think you may also be able to make your own ribbon sections, and pin icons to the titlebar. I'm a fan, it's the most flexible menu system I've ever seen.
-
@marczellm I know at least one corporation where their staff believe they have more licenses for the 365 than the normal Office desktop, and are limiting the number of people that can use the desktop one.
-
@magus said in MS Office being rewritten in JavaScript?:
and pin icons to the titlebar
That I know you can do; not sure about the other things.
Windows Live Mesh - Wikipedia
