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Comment by funkiee | Hacker News Reader

This quote rings very true to me: "Speaking off the record, a Microsoft employee with the Windows 8 team confessed that the Metro team was "very surprised" when they saw how the Visual Studio team had interpreted the Metro guidelines. We share in his puzzlement."

Visual Studio stands out even from other Windows 8 system applications in its usage of the "Metro" style.

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Idiots. It's not "Metro" that VS 2012 is trying to copy with this look; it's Office 2013. See http://zapp5.staticworld.net/images/article/2012/07/3_word_r... for an example.

VS is still ugly, of course, but it's because the designers copied the ugly Office design -- not because they didn't understand Metro.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but no longer on the VS team. Also, I have a cold and am in a bad mood.

I can see exactly what you mean, but the point you make is marred by your usage of the word "Idiots." The concept of Office being a different kind of "Metro" than normal Metro is not obvious to everyone.

Edit: I guess I'm just confused about who "Idiots" refers to. The quoted MS employee? The people agreeing with the quote? Everyone in the comment thread?

Also, to be clear: I work at MS and on a couple small parts of VS. I wasn't really part of any of the UI decisions.

Give the poster a break, idiots could refer to whoever at Microsoft said that (as they were correctly not well informed nor had any special information).

Office and Visual Studio are of the new "metro-inspired" UIs that, for very good reasons, cannot migrate away from desktop right now. I'm sure we'll eventually see some of these apps move to more Metro UIs (Office?), but for some they will always be desktop (Visual Studio).

Disclaimer: work for Microsoft, but nowhere near these teams.

"Idiots" is mostly because I'm in a bad mood. But also, yeah, referring both to the person being quoted and to the person doing the quoting.

Good to know that I'm an idiot for thinking that VS2012 is trying to follow guidelines by a product in RTM instead of a product that is in beta and I have no interaction with. Of course I'm also just in a bad mood because I have to use the Pending Changes window in VS 2012 on a daily basis.

It runs on the "Desktop" side of Windows 8, rather than in the "Metro environment" (for lack of or perhaps my own ignorance of a better term), right? If so, should it even really be trying to use the Metro style? I'm not familiar with Microsoft's guidelines on this, but I'd imagined that "desktop apps" would continue to use something similar to the traditional Windows design language.

Edit: CurtHagenlocher's comment cleared some of the confusion up for me. It's not Metro, it's ... "Windows 8 style". Wait no, that term means Metro too. It's "Office 2013" style.

I would expect their own apps to rely on whatever user interface libraries the OS offers in order to remain consistent and seamlessly integrate with the other applications on the machine. I have used Windows (and developed lots of software on it) and it always struck me as odd that some MS applications had bits and pieces of the next release of Windows cooked into its interface. I am used to various UI flavors at the same time and rarely even notice it, but I spend most of my time on Linux and I would never expect Emacs to nicely blend in with the rest of the Unity desktop.

Is it too hard to make an IDE only with the UI elements Windows offers? How much extra effort does it represent to make an application that's different from the vanilla look and feel of the environment?

How many ribbons Microsoft has? http://85mph.posterous.com/ui-consistency-anyone

You should have heard what we said when we saw the Server 2012, Visual Studio 2012, and Windows 8 GUIs.

"Damn! WTF are they smoking in Redmond!?"

Thankfully I can run all the above in virtual machines. :)

I think they ignored the metro guidelines. Thank fuck.

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