Paul Stovell says…

A couple of cool plugins have come out lately. The first is Joseph Cooney’s DB Object QuickFind for SQL Server Management Studio:

The second is Corneliu Tusnea’s TFS Quick Search plugin for Visual Studio:

Both very cool plugins, which leads me to a bit of a rant. Why weren’t these simple features included out-of-the-box?

Earlier this week, Leon Bambrick posted an idea for a search filter for the Office ribbon:

I was thinking along similar lines a couple of months ago when I posted some half-baked ideas:

• In Outlook, typing “new m” would filter until “New Message” appeared - hitting Enter would open the New Message window (the one where you write your email).
• In Microsoft CRM, typing “new u” would filter until “New User” appeared, which would take you to the screen you’d normally have to go via Settings->Business Unit Settings->Users->New Users.
• In Internet Explorer, the filter would filter your list of Favourites and browsing history to figure out where you want to go - this is faster than both the Address auto-complete and doing a search.

Here’s the thing I don’t get. One of the major evolutions in UI that was supposed to come with Vista is the "search paradigm", which behind all the marketing talk, really means this thing:

How come so many products are devoid of this kind of search?

Contrast the Firefox find (Ctrl+F):

To the Internet Explorer or Visual Studio find dialogs:

(Note that the dialog is still using MS Sans Serif as the font instead of Tahoma or Segoe. Did they miss the memo?)

It seems trivial, but it makes a big difference when refining your search. The Firefox version is all keyboard, while the IE version almost invariably involves a mouse.

And why, after so many years, can I still not do multi-line find and replace in Visual Studio?

As Darren wrote recently, some parts of Microsoft just don’t seem to have gotten the whole User Experience thing, despite how much they talk about it:

How is it that Microsoft can spend so many marketing and evangelism dollars telling us about the new world of user experiences and then supply us with such a crap tool?

Here’s a tip: User Experience is NOT about going from this:

…to this:

Rather, User Experience is about going from this:

…to this:

Well done to Corneliu and Joseph!

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