Tuesday, November 5, 2019

How valid data leads to problematic conclusions

For people who got used to the New Project dialog, finding an appropriate project type raises no issues at all. The tree-like structure (the same for years) make the navigation quick and you always follow the same pattern "language-framework-project type".
Visual Studio 2019 introduces the new look of the dialog. There's a Visual Studio Blog entry with a story behind the new look. In short, they've collected the telemetry data (the data that is automatically collected by the VS and sent back to Microsoft), performed some interviews and observed that developers are confused by the taxonomy presented on the project tree which causes the drop-off to opening a project.
Where the telemetry data is possibly objective, the interpretation is not. The team seems to put everyone in the very same basket - someone who just downloaded the VS and runs it for the first time in their life and a professional who uses VS for almost two decades. In the latter case, the team observed that even for experienced developers, some of the options weren’t intuitive. Most couldn’t pinpoint the link to ‘Open Visual Studio Installer’ when the templates they were looking for weren’t available. What's the solution to all these (very different issues)?
This:
Every single developer I ask (myself included) is disappointed by the new look and the behavior of this something. Example comments from below the blog entry:
  • From my own experience, I find it more confusing and time consuming to create new projects with the new dialog concept.
  • Yes, this new dialog is the worst experience from VS 2019.
  • I liked old new project dialog more. New one is confusing.
  • This new dialog just ensures that most developers will only ever see the top 5 or so project templates and that the rest of them may as well not even exist.
  • I absolutely positvely hate the new dialog.
The list continues in a similar manner so guess what ... the comment section has been closed.
The good news is that there's an Extension in the marketplace, the Classis "New Project" Dialog and the feedback here is expected
  • Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
  • From one extension developer to another one - well done!
  • Thank you! This saved my life. I found the out of box "New project" dialog of VS2019 to be very limiting.
Download and rate this extension and have at least one inconvenience resolved. Whoever wrote the extension - thank you for your contribution.

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