
Microsoft Project Siena (Beta) - T-A
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ProjectSiena
======
skrebbel
Just played around with it for an hour or so. I really like the UI, it's very
basic yet quite powerful. I like how they used Win8 UX concepts for a complex
app, it works much better than I would've expected. I find myself using my
laptop's touch screen as a matter of course.

It's quite powerful even without the using the function reference, because
common actions have dedicated UI, and all fields have great autocomplete. I
also realized that a modern HyperCard is really just all I wanted, and it
seems that this may be it.

That said, it _really_ lacks on the documentation side. The function reference
is a start, but without understanding the concepts, getting something real to
work feels a little impossible. (Example: `Remove` removes an "item", but how
is an "item" identified? Does a screen have a "current item"? How does this
work?)

Still, a very nice start. I hope this gets better fast and then I'll want to
be a power user.

I also hope they won't start charging Access-style prices for it.

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emmett
I found this page most incomprehensible, so I looked around.

A reasonable summary of what they're trying to build here is "HyperCard for
the internet", which is actually a pretty cool idea.

This article had the best short summary in my opinion:
[http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/19/5227140/microsoft-
project...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/19/5227140/microsoft-project-
siena-windows-apps)

~~~
arebop
"HyperCard for Windows 8" rather: It's a Windows 8 application for making
Windows 8 applications (which can use the network). Which makes this much less
interesting to me.

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undoware
This product is aimed at fledgling entrepreneurs with an interest in accruing
the benefits of technology, but without the expertise or in-house resources to
leverage the FOSS chain.

Remember: From our perspective, MS is a bunch of evil-empire joykills: lock-
in, licensing, lucifier. But for most businesspeople, especially the non-
startup bootstrappers, they are promethean, stealing fire from the mandarins
of software engineering and bestowing it on worthy dreamers. FOSS is hard;
cross-platform is hard; Siena is easy.

Personal context: I flinch instinctively when I see or hear MS' products.
However, I'm responsible for ops at my job and I know damned well that there
are several generations of small businesses for whom 'business management' is
spelled 'A-C-C-E-S-S'. You can criticize this, you can complain about this,
you can pay a bunch of bright young things to rewrite it Node or whatever, but
you are never going to convince the businessowner that Access is a bad idea.

That same businessowner started one day in his garage with an empty Access
database and remembers both it and those days with justified fondness. He's
still just getting over not being able to 'improve' your schema on his laptop
on lunch break so it 'makes more sense'.

I predict in ten years there will be a huge market for consultants getting
businessses OFF this thing. But there will also be a huge pool of new
businesses it helped create, so on balance, let me be the first to say: Hello
World, Siena, and welcome.

~~~
kitsune_
And the Mac equivalent to Access here is FileMaker. Entire kingdoms have been
built by using one of these applications as a foundation.

~~~
undoware
Right. Which is why my first advice to a non-tech person starting a business
is _still_ 'go out and get Access'. Because I can pitch as hard as I like for
Node and Angular, I'm never going to make callback-passing and dependency
injection as intuitive as 'New Access Database Wizard'.

Come to think of it, 'use Access' is pretty good advice for businessy techies,
too. It's a lot harder to rabbit-hole when the earth is actually molded
plastic. :)

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rshlo
Looks nice. The problem with M$ is that over the years they've always offered
simple tools for creating software, and then abandoning it somewhere along the
way. Access is a great example.

~~~
sergiotapia
I don't know why you were voted down. Had I invested heavily in learning
Silverlight a couple of years ago, I would find myself with my thumb squarely
secured up my own ass.

I can't imagine spending so much time and effort learning how to use a
framework only to have it discontinued in it's infancy. Silverlight dying was
a good thing and ultimately it's a win for everybody as HTML is more open, but
still - I feel for the devs out there who waste their time.

Edit: On the plus it does use HTML and JS, instead of something much more
closed. :)

~~~
TheAnimus
>I don't know why you were voted down. Had I invested heavily in learning
Silverlight a couple of years ago, I would find myself with my thumb squarely
secured up my own ass.

Not really, as someone who specialised in WPF since it's latter beta stages, I
still am finding plenty of work at a very good rate. Same thing goes with
silverlight, even in a discontinued state, it still is going to have years and
years of bug fixes. Just no new functionality.

The fact is, even today with all the frustrations I have with WPF been
'unfinished' it is still a lot more pleasurable than HTML/Knockout or
something that tries to make HTML palatable.

A quick search in London on your favourite job site shows that learning WPF
hasn't been a waste of time, my skills are not in a vacuum, I also have strong
OOP skills, whilst knowing how to run software projects. Plus learning
something is never bad. Obviously I wouldn't recommend someone learning it
now. But compare it with whichever flavour of the month framework people are
loving right now, people who've learn say Ruby on Rails aren't as fashionable
as say Node.js is right now. But just do a quick jobs search in London and
you'll see that you'd be better off on average doing WPF/Silverlight than RoR.

~~~
Spearchucker
It's better than that - WPF and Silverlight skills are directly transferrable
to Windows Phone and Windows RT. Yes, there are differences, limitations and
in some cases more complete features, but the jump is negligible, with a herd
of good resources on MSDN, StackOverflow and so on.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
It's better than that. I find WPF to be the most flexible/powerful UI toolkit
I've ever worked with (disclaimer: I work for Microsoft). If you ignore
anything more complex than Canvas, Label, Rectangle, Image, you can cook up
anything you want fairly easily (e.g. a tablet-based programming environment,
a live programming editor), and actually have it look nice.

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randomfool
What's the relation between this and LightSwitch? Both are from DevDiv and it
seems like there's a good deal of overlap in goals.

Is LightSwitch being de-emphasized (put on life support) because it doesn't
fully encourage WinRT?

~~~
gecko
LightSwitch is going web-only, as far as I can tell, so this may simply be
splitting off and rebranding the Win 8 side of things.

~~~
joseph_cooney
Because if there's one thing the MS ecosystem needs, it's more dev
fragmentation....

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spitfire
Cool! We're catching up to Enterprise Object Framework from NeXT in 1994.[1]

Skip to 23:00 for the demo of Steve Jobs building a database app in a few
minutes. Yes, this is stuff we should have.

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk)

~~~
josephcooney
I think VB3 had all that too.

I liked at the 21:00 minute mark how he was telling us how awesome faxes were.
Surely iOS could do more with faxes.

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danso
I don't have a critique of this on technical merits, and obviously, an
initiative that helps all users better manage information is step forward. And
this isn't a critique of Microsoft specifically, but the descriptive copy for
it follows a trend that bugs me:

> _View and download sample apps, learn best practices, and see how other app
> builders are using Project Siena to build visually stunning interactive apps
> today._

Why does everything have to be "visually stunning" these days? No, I don't
mean in actuality, but _described_ as such? A service that can build useful
apps that improve our lives should be associated with adjectives like
"powerful", "flexible", "intuitive"...And no, I don't endorse the use of
adjectives in general, I'm just saying I wish copywriters, their managers,
their product designers, etc. would not worry so much about "beauty"
especially when "beautiful" is something that can be seen and should speak for
itself.

I guess it's not the copywriters' fault as so much as just writing what the
public likes to see...I wish the public would expand their concept of what
good software is, how "beauty" is great, but not at all the primary
requirement for the domain of something like the OP.

And of course Microsoft is not alone at fault. If anything, Apple probably
inspired it, and who can blame Apple considering their success? Look at how
their copy for a _spreadsheet application_ :

[http://www.apple.com/creativity-apps/mac/](http://www.apple.com/creativity-
apps/mac/)

> _Numbers helps you make spreadsheets more insightful — and more beautiful.
> Drop your data into a stunning, Apple-designed template. Or start with a
> blank canvas. Add in some quick calculations. Then visualize the numbers
> with a dramatic interactive chart. Suddenly, you see what it all means. How
> beautiful is that?_

(I'll be the first to admit, I do like having nice typography in my Terminal,
though)

~~~
randomfool
The copy is cringe-worthy in general-

"a new technology for business experts, business analysts, consultants, and
other app imagineers. Now, without any programming, you can create powerful
apps for the device-first and cloud-connected world, with the potential to
transform today’s business processes."

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MartinMond
This has the potential to be awesome. Looks like a Windows RT-ready stripped-
down MS Access. Something that allows e.g. sales people to create fancy
presentations slash catalogues.

I'm not on the Windows platform and have no need to move there, but it's good
to see some innovation coming from them.

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concise_unicorn
Is it just me or does it fail to explain just what it is, exactly?

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puppetmaster3
This thing lets non programmers, like marketing folk, write an app. This is
very good. Not apps don't require a real programmer, we can do real work.

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bnastic
Are they hoping to create Visual Basic for the new generation? Microsoft can
only hope to make this as popular as VB was some 15-20 years ago.

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theFluke
Now everyone can have their very own custom recipe app.

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Poiesis
If this was recently released, they sure have poor timing. If this has been
around a while, seems like poor marketing.

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_random_
Another HTML5 crap... I was hoping for a new technology.

~~~
erikj
What kind of "new technology" did you want to see?

~~~
vezzy-fnord
HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS, obviously.

[http://html9responsiveboilerstrapjs.com/](http://html9responsiveboilerstrapjs.com/)

~~~
mhurron
Exactly what I was looking for, thanks.

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al2o3cr
Great, I was worried the entire ecosystem of Geocities-UXed VB apps on Windows
might disappear with the change to flat UI. ;)

