Our new immersive OneNote client shipped

In case you did not see the announcement on our OneNote Team blog, we shipped a new version of OneNote available in the Windows 8 store! In this case, I want to share some behind the scenes test notes with getting that release out the door and into the store.

One of the minor changes we made was updating the "Welcome to OneNote" page that gets created when you first start OneNote. I checked in the new page and that immediately caused a performance test to fail. This was simply something I had overlooked. We time our startup timing to the millisecond and new page simply has more data on it than the old page. Here's a snippet of the new page:

It's got more text and images and that extra data takes a small amount of time to render which caused the performance test to take a little bit longer than expected so it got flagged as a failure. I double checked with our team that this was expected (it was) so the only action needed was to update the timing of the test.

Next up was a late change we took to work with Office 365 notebooks if you are running the Windows Blue preview. The previous version would not work in this case due to authentication errors, so we put in a fix to allow this to work. Anecdotally, this was the number one email I received from internal users once the Windows Blue preview was released so I am very happy to get a fix in place for that error.

Finally, I noticed that our automated tests that check for Windows Store compliance were not running correctly. I'll talk about that next time.

In the meantime, hop over to the Windows Store and update your OneNote client!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John