MS Teams 2.0 – trying to fix the issues | Hacker News Reader

MS Teams 2.0 – trying to fix the issues

windowscentral.com

31 pointsOcha39 comments

Please just let me send code blocks in chat without messing up the line breaks...

How do people deal with Teams' vastly inferior chat after coming from Slack or Mattermost or anything else remotely modern?

> Please just let me send code blocks in chat without messing up the line breaks...

Teams supports inline and multi-line code blocks using Markdown formatting. I can't try it ATM, but does that not work as it does in Slack?

In a 1:1 chat, there's no support for multi-line code blocks. There _is_ support in team channels, but when you copy-paste on the receiving end, line breaks don't make it through into the paste buffer.

It’s buggy as hell and non-intuitive

Teams does not use proper markdown formatting. In both Teams and Slack you can open a code block with three apostrophes (```), but in Slack you can also use three apostrophes to close it. In Teams that doesn't work - the only way to close a block is to type in two consecutive line breaks. This means you cannot have empty lines in the middle of your code (at least not without workarounds).

Shift+Enter is your friend, at least in that one particular situation. Alt+Enter seems to work as well. Ctrl+Enter will send the message.

Teams code blocks using triple tick screw up indenting. To get a semi functional code block I have to click 3+ buttons in the text formatting screens. It’s a train wreck.

I recently switched to a company that uses Teams, after the last two companies I worked for using Slack.

I ran into this one constantly. And lately when I paste something in and set the paragraph type to monospace, it puts a box around every single line! I've tried using the code snippet thing, but that adds so much padding and insists on adding a title. I've kind of given up on trying to make code or terminal snippets look okay in Teams.

It's frustrating that a company with as many developers as MS has can't seem to get this right. Do they not dogfood Teams? Whatever happened to "Developers! Developers! Developers!"?

Have you managed to figure out how to create a numbered list with more than one item in it? I certainly haven't.

Type `1. <text>`, then just press Enter to add new items. Press Enter twice to finish the list.

Also, tab and shift+tab seem to work to indent and unindent, for sub-lists.

Wait, what? The effect of the Enter key changes from sending the message to adding a newline when within a list? There's no indication that hitting enter won't just send the message like normal. Thanks for the heads up!

I begged and pleaded with my Microsoft rep about this and he went between myself and the Teams people; the current behavior is intentional and a design decision.

they want (they REALLY want) to allow users to copy from Teams and paste into Teams as RTF and many of their design decisions revolve around this decision. when you type markdown formatting cues into Teams they get converted to RTF which is why it's such a pain (or simply impossible) to edit something at either end of a specially formatted bit of text.

maybe they've undone this stupidity in teams 2.0 but their love of backwards compatibility tells me "no," very loudly.

Wtf rtf? If they want to preserve that then create an rtf box mode and separate it out for most users which expect something else.

why support two input mechanisms when you can only support one?

NIH syndrome raging in Microsoft culture still, I see.

it's more about clipboard interop between Office applications, even old ones, and old documents created with those tools.

> maybe they've undone this stupidity in teams 2.0 but their love of backwards compatibility tells me "no," very loudly.

All I can say is hold your praise.. :(

Pastebins.

The same way I deal with any Electron app with exception of VS Code, run it in the browser and only during the time I am obligied to it due to project requirements, it it is delivered, I quickly forget my account.

> How do people deal with Teams' vastly inferior chat after coming from Slack or Mattermost or anything else remotely modern?

I'm an engineering manager at a multinational company, which also have remote employees.

Half a year ago, we got a new Director of Engineering, who decided to move from Slack to Teams, due to compliance implementation.

No one in the engineering teams want to use Teams at all; they deal with it by secretly having a Slack Team that only they (as far as they know, at least) know about.

While the rest of the company is forced to use Teams, the engineers are using Slack as they've always been doing.

Coworkers copy/pasting code snippets through teams led to data corruption in production. That was a fun one to track down.

OneNote users have been asking for full-featured code blocks for decades at this point and MS can’t or won’t do it.

Not surprising to see it suck so bad in Teams.

I don't have much hope for this.

Their "own" edge WebView2 tech is powered by chromium, the same as what powers the old electron.

And "based on react not JavaScript"... React is a framework in JavaScript.

Neither are fundamental improvements. They're more branding than anything.

None of these explanations make any sense. What would make sense is if their team stops prioritizing glossy new features and optimizes the core code. Just like the VS Code team has done from the very start.

Perhaps this is what they are doing and they're trying to peddle their WebView in the process. If it's just those 2 changes they mention I'm sure the result will be underwhelming. As always with Teams so far.

More likely Teams was written quickly as a response to Slack and some poor decisions were made along the way.

Performance and resource usage are my two biggest issues with Teams so this is a welcome update. I don’t think Teams is perfect, but it is useful for what it is and generally is good enough.

Performance and resource usage is bad, but it is a far cry from being the biggest issues I have with Teams.

Inability to handle formatting of messages is a big one. It will decide that my codeblock should actually be two, and it is impossible to merge them.

Scrolling in opposite directions depending on the tab.

Making up another SharePoint site with each group team chat so that we can ensure we silo our data and never find it again.

Ah Microsoft - the hypocritical company where they moralize to you every year at their conference that you should write modern apps (this year’s menu: WinUI 3 and MAUI), while their Teams, Office, and Visual Studio groups all refuse to use any of the frameworks made in the last decade.

Is Visual Studio not WinUI? Or are you reffing to vs code?

Visual Studio can be used to make WinUI apps if you install the toolkit, but there is not a single WinUI interface within Visual Studio itself. VS Code is Electron, no WinUI there either.

For the love of God, please give us a normal Win32 API app.

Better yet, protocol specs.

Heh, now that's a hopeful dream

that'll work great on Mac and Linux and the web...

Alternatively, they could just keep the Web version and be done with it.

C#/.NET would work just fine as well. Surprising they don’t want to eat their own…

Microsoft has poor employee retention, which in some groups is especially noticeable because they reinvent the wheel every 2-3 years.

Right now everything is JavaScript. Shh! I’m talking! I said everything! To the point that getting a non-SPA code sample for Azure Identity is a serious research exercise. That Visual Studio will deploy a blank ASP.NET project that has mostly JavaScript in it. And so on…

Formatting is annoying in Teams but I've mostly learned to work around the issues. My number one annoyance, that doesn't seem to be mentioned that often, is that there are many places where you can't get a direct link to a message. I get a huge volume of activity in teams, and there are many things I need to bookmark for later action that would be too challenging to find again. Most of the time, I can't right click and save a link, although sometimes in the web interface it's enough to copy the url. Providing deep links to any message in teams is my number one feature request.

i have bought latest x86 surface pro week ago. installed many programs, most are oss. and teams. and then i got machine hot and noisy. i looked into task manager. all programs eat zero cpu with random spikes of few under 0.1 cpu. but teams was eating constantly 4 or 5. i did not talked teams at all never on this device. just deleted teams. i know that raising bug or complaining about teams into support is useless. i even found ms principal product owner of teams in linkedin to write the issue. so pc is of my wife, and she uses teams on android and ok with that. so did nothing. hope they fixed the situation.

so when people on youtube say ipad better because battery life and noise. how much teams was root cause of harm to surface sales?

> It's a complete rebuild from the ground up

"There is no problem in Windows that a reboot cannot fix"

"There is no problem in Windows that a complete reinstall cannot fix"

Call me skeptic.

https://teams.microsoft.com/v2

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