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Comment by sterlind | Hacker News Reader

(I work for MS, though in core Azure rather than Office or Windows.)

I think that PowerShell story was how old MS worked, back in the days of stack ranking, hatred of Linux and the Longhorn fiasco. things inside the company are a lot more functional now. I saw internal politics drama at my first position, but once I moved everything was chill, and experimentation and contributing across team boundaries was actively encouraged and rewarded.

I suspect Office suffers from a ton of technical debt, along with being architecturally amorphous and dating from a pre-cloud era. as for Windows, the amount of breakage I see in the betas suggests they're not afraid of making deep changes, it's probably that MSVCRT is a living fossil and has to support old programs monkeypatching the guts of malloc or something.

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any idea what the hell is going on with Teams?

why can't i simply scroll up in my own conversations? let alone search them. the sticky sludge of communication in something as simple as chat has cost me hours since i was forced to use teams. outlook search is so superior to teams i'd easily prefer to have lync back. this one thing absolutely cripples communication. there are a list of other very basic issues that make communicating code blocks frustrating. i see new app features here and there, i saw some feature added the other day which won't help anyone. i just don't understand the prioritization of issues

i don't expect a direct answer to this, although i hope to read an explanation one day

EDIT: i removed content from this comment that was missing the point

PEBKAC, you can scroll and search chats in teams.

> you can scroll

outrageously slowly, and i'm not talking about a couple HTTP requests and a database query slow

> and search

search is not practical in my opinion. i'd go as far as saying it's unusable. i can _find individual messages_, but there are times (often, i might add!) where context or jumping to that message aren't even options. context is often the reason you search for messages in the first place. if i'm alone here, sure, PEBKAC

I actually think it's fair to say the chat search in Teams is basically unusable. You can search them, sure, but it only finds single chat messages with no way to go to that message to read the context around it. So, if the chat message you find has the word you wanted but not the information, then you're basically out of luck unless you keep guessing words and find the message with what you wanted.

I think I understand why it works this way too. If you search _channels_, then the search will show the messages with that word but link you to the entire conversation that message appears in. But for chats, each individual message is basically treated like it's own conversation and thus search only displays the single message with no context.

A quick Google suggests I'm not alone in this criticism, and it's been a problem for even longer than I've been using Teams (a year or two): https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/teams...

I'm able to search chats on my phone and PC and go to that message when I search, and get all the context around it. Even messages that are several years old. I just tested it. Maybe it's just your Teams settings?

I figured I would go check and it seems you're somewhat right, for newer messages (a few weeks) it does link me straight to the chat message so I can view the messages around it. Older messages from Ex. last year still have the behavior in the screenshot of the issue I linked - 'Go to message' simply takes me to a screen with only that message displayed and no others, with no way to actually get to that message in the chat. Obviously I don't have an easy way to tell yet if it's fixed for all messages going forward, or if it only works for recent messages, but either way it's some progress. Presumably in time I'll be able to tell.

So I donno, perhaps it's something funky with our Teams deployment, but this is such a basic feature that I have a hard time understanding how it could ever be implemented this way. Certainly no other chat service I've used has had this kind of problem.

Why don't the arrow keys work half the time in the chat input box?

downvote me all you want. maybe the quality of my comment was bad.

in my opinion, the team or leader who is responsible for prioritizing issues in Teams needs a major adjustment. their flaws are brazen and affecting all of us who are forced to use Teams for communication.

It was interesting the see them switch back to Win32 after all of these greenfield alternatives that quickly died. (WPF, WinRT, etc.) Makes you wonder what was going on during that time. Contrast Apple which has been with Cocoa which is an evolution of Next Step.

Apple wanted to force Cocoa on everyone but had to delay their OS an entire year to build Carbon so that developers would actually port their Mac apps to OS X.

A number of Apple's original core apps (like iTunes, AppleWorks, etc.) were Carbonized apps.

Finder was Carbon until 10.6. It's probably a message to show developers that Apple was serious about Carbon.

Kind of, Windows 11 WinRT components are still based on UWP, as WinUI 3.0 and WinAppSDK aren't yet up to the job of replacing it.

WinRT hasn't died, that is what WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK is all about, making that COM infrastructure available on the Win32 side, even though their progress is quite slow.

I think it will take them 2 years still to reach feature parity with UWP features.

You have it backwards, UWP is based on WinRT (which is built on top of the COM underpinnnings) and not the other way around.

Having used it since Windows 8 days, I know pretty much how it all goes.

Nowadays there are two WinRT models, the original underlying UWP that grew out of the UAP / WinRT evolution introduced in Windows 8.1, to simplify what was originally split across phones, tablets and desktop.

And now the WinRT implementation on top of Win32, started as Project Reunion, rebranded as WinAppSDK alongside WinUI 3.0.

I’m not trying to be particularly pedantic but that still doesn’t make WinAppSdk built on UWP; it’s mainly an expanded and cleaned-up collection of first-party cross-language wrappers/bridges/ffi to WinRT to hide the COM underpinnings plus unify some of the disparate Win32 vs WinRT APIs.

As you know, WinRT predates UWP. UWP as tech isn’t strictly defined but it includes things that are out of the scope of WinRT itself and aren’t available via WinAppSDK even now that UWP is finally, officially dead.

Looking how things have shaped through the years with WinRT, UWP, WinUI and related projects, at least WinDev seems to still be living in the past culture while trying to pretend to actually have changed.

The rate PMs change, how they lack understanding that we are fed up with rewrites, how they seem to believe we would still care and hope that in a couple of years WinUI 3.0 will actually be usable, how bugs in public repos accumulate,....

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