Roslyn: Suggestion: Creating a repo for Visual Studio feedback/bugs?

[eyalsk]

Currently, there are 2 places you can send feedback to from within Visual Studio:

1. UserVoice

2. VSFeedback

Both of these options are awful from a consumer point of view:

UserVoice has a clumsy, unattractive user interface and isn't so welcoming, the text area is small so you can't even write the suggestion there, you have to use an external text editor and then copy/paste it.

It doesn't support markdown which is a problem, I mean this platform was made to post ideas and yet lack basic support for text formatting which is important especially when you need to mix text and code in the same post.

Last but not least, in fact probably the most important thing is when you want to post and track comments there it's far from pleasant, the experience is just bad, at least in my opinion.

VSFeedback is better when it comes to the overall _look and feel_ of the UI but it seems to exists only to give feedback about existing features and/or report bugs.

When it comes to posting and tracking comments is just as bad as UserVoice.

GitHub as opposed to the above options is amazing in many ways so what I'm proposing is to create a repo such as Microsoft\Visual Studio or dotnet\Visual Studio (not sure what makes more sense) that will track both suggestions, bugs and whatnot that relates to Visual Studio.

This has few _advantages_:

1. This can reduce the amount of IDE posts that are posted on the Roslyn repo.

   _I actually don't know whether this is an advantage but when I'm posting issues that relates to the IDE on Roslyn it feels _wrong_, however, I really dislike the alternatives so I end up posting them here, hence my post._

   Maybe it would make sense to reuse this repo instead of creating a new one if it makes things easier from the product standpoint, either way, I'd prefer to use GitHub.

2. This will allow people to post freely without wondering whether something is a bug, a suggestion or something in between and for things that are neither a bug nor a suggestion both UserVoice and VSFeedback feels like they are the wrong place for it.

3. This will allow people to track both their bugs and suggestions in a single place, everywhere, conveniently on any device.

4. This will create an even bigger community because everyone will reach the same place.

_I don't know if people feel the same way as I do and whether it's a good idea and a welcome change, I don't even know what it requires from Microsoft standpoint but I'm voting for it._ 😄

[DavidArno]

I'm with you on this. Recently I've been using deconstructions and have realised they are - contrary to what I previously felt and said - immensely useful. It would be great to have a way of feeding this back to the language team. UserVoice and VSFeedback don't feel the right place, whereas creating a Github issue seems wrong too.

[miloush]

I don't trust the feedback on UserVoice is going anywhere useful. The number of items you can submit is significantly limited and items get closed simply because "they are old". You are not allowed to have too many ideas, and there is no communication.

I did create a GitHub issue in the past to acknowledge a feature that made my day. Although I considered its appropriateness, I thought that positive feedback is worth the burden of closing the issue for the team.

And I do miss as effective communication with other IDE teams as we have with Roslyn, not sure though what the Roslyn team can do about it. :-)

[jmarolf]

As someone working on roslyn, I really like people filing as many bugs as they can on github. I will often try and move bugs from VSFeedback to github when I can so the filer can see the PR that fixes their issue and comment if they want to. I also hope we someday have a more streamlined process for people to just install fixes and verify that they work.

In general, we as the roslyn team have no power to force other Visual Studio teams to use github. So all I or any team member can really do is pass these ideas on to others as suggestions. A lot of teams are on github though, and as the number gets bigger we may want a general VS repo that could direct people to the specific team on github. What do you think of that?

@eyalsk speaking to your specific points

• This can reduce the amount of IDE posts that are posted on the Roslyn repo. I'm curious what everyone thinks about this. I personally don't mind IDE bugs. If the bug can be fixed in roslyn we fix it (hopefully :smile:), otherwise we hand them off to the internal team in Visual Studio that can. We haven't had many people filing general feature requests for Visual Studio so this hasn't been much of a problem. I can understand people feeling that having a lot of different kinds of bugs for different feature areas can be daunting and perhaps make it hard to track what is going on. Would you like a different place to discuss the IDE experience?

• This will allow people to post freely without wondering whether something is a bug, a suggestion or something in between and for things that are neither a bug nor a suggestion I'm reading this as we need a place for discussions to happen not just for people to file issues. gitter is one place where people can ask general questions, but should we have something else? rust uses discourse which integrates with github. Is that something we should look into? I personally don't feel that github is great for general discussions, but I could be wrong.

Regarding feedback, you can always tweet at roslyn on twitter. I know not everyone is on twitter but I can say most of the roslyn team is and they will definitely see it.

[eyalsk]

@jmarolf

As someone working on roslyn, I really like people filing as many bugs as they can on github. I will often try and move bugs from VSFeedback to github when I can so the filer can see the PR that fixes their issue and comment if they want to. I also hope we someday have a more streamlined process for people to just install fixes and verify that they work.

This would be amazing! ❤️

VS repo that could direct people to the specific team on github. What do you think of that?

In my opinion that would be a step in the right direction, it might also be a good place to discuss other things such as Visual Studio Extensions with the community and/or Microsoft employees and things that don't exactly fit within Roslyn.

Would you like a different place to discuss the IDE experience?

Yes, I have few ideas for Visual Studio and I don't know whether it make sense to post them here for example I have a feature request to sample a symbol and change its color as opposed to look it up in the Fonts and Colors tab and I don't know if posting something like this make sense here.

I'm reading this as we need a place for discussions to happen not just for people to file issues. gitter is one place where people can ask general questions, but should we have something else? rust uses discourse which integrates with github. Is that something we should look into? I personally don't feel that github is great for general discussions, but I could be wrong.

I actually love to have the discussions on GitHub because there's no paging or anything that can disturb you, you can read it all, straight from top to bottom and I find it convenient.

I'm using Discourse so I don't mind it even though to tell you the truth I still prefer GitHub, I mean it works for other teams such as VSCode, TypeScript and even here on Roslyn so I'm not sure if there's a point in changing it but still, why do you feel like it isn't a great place for discussions? :)

Regarding feedback, you can always tweet at roslyn on twitter. I know not everyone is on twitter but I can say most of the roslyn team is and they will definitely see it.

Yeah, I can probably do that although I use my twitter mostly to read things.

[miloush]

To be fair GitHub's ability to move issues between repositories is suboptimal, and if an issue needs to be redirected, there doesn't seem to be any advantage of doing it from a separate repository, other than making you feel better submitting it. The obvious problem is who would be in charge of that repository? Also given the recent investments into the Developer Community, it seems unlikely that yet another channel would be created and managed.

[eyalsk]

@miloush Well, I don't mind using the Roslyn repo for everything if it makes things easier. :)

[kingces95]

Created Move to GitHub issue on developercommunity.visualstudio.com so we can up vote there too. The top issue has only 61 votes so... I guess if we can clear that then we're big winners and if not, well, then maybe people are happy with the way things are! :)