Today, I had to print out all the .cs files in a Visual Studio project for code review. To my big surprise it wasn’t possible from within Visual Studio. It doesn’t even support multiple file printing. My only choice was to open and print the individual .cs files and print them separately. It’s just an unnecessary nuisance that could easily have been implemented by Microsoft.

All this made me think about how I write software and what the users of that software expect of it and how they use it. Normally, I have a pretty good idea about how my application is going to be used, but I always get surprised by the way it is actually being used by end users.

Things that the users would expect to find in an application should always be there. Otherwise, they get annoyed and maybe even frustrated. It’s extra work, but probably not that much.

I know, it sounds silly but hear me out. In March 2006 I wrote a post about the use of Word as a text editor for writing blog posts, because it would be the natural place to do so. At that time Office 2007 was in beta 1 if I remember correctly and Word did not have the functionality to do blog posts at that point. I wrote a mail to Microsoft suggesting that it would be a cool feature to include in Word 2007. They never wrote back.

A couple of months later, Office 2007 beta 2 was released and now Word had the functionality to write blog posts just as I suggested in the email. In the beta 2 it didn’t really work very well, so you could see that it was a last minute feature they had added. If they got the idea from me, then it makes sense that the feature in beta 2 was so bad, because Microsoft didn’t have much time to code it.

So did they steal my idea? Probably not, but the chain of events is a little peculiar I think.