Sunday, June 03, 2007

Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map

The Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map is a neat application.

Neat because:

1) It uses WPF. So now you can read documenatation or the New York Times with this "revolutionary technology".

2) It uses clickonce for installation. This is the first example I have seen of a clickonce application from Microsoft. Why? It seems like a good solution on the surface...

3) It's an interesting way to explore the doumentation. Most of the time, we search for documentation rather than browsing. We are trying to get a job done, and we need to know how to do it. So we use Google. But sometimes you just want to browse and find out what you can do. Here's one place where Google isn't helpful.

I wonder if we will see more efforts like this at changing the documentation interface. I suspect this was really just a way to demo (or for someone to learn) WPF. But maybe it will inspire some folks to make more of an effort on documentation?