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Start.com Released

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I had been working on start.com on and off about 4 - 5 months ago. I had moved onto another project and started working fulltime on start.com a couple of weeks ago. It has been a fun time so far. We went from /3 to www.start.com. We are still preview though. We feel almost legitimate now :).

Sanaz has blogged about all of the new features here. I am not going to talk about features here though. I wanted to take you through what we did the last three days, and nights. We were supposed to ship on Monday, but we had made a mistake. We used IE for our testing when developing, so Firefox had quite a few bugs and rough edges. With Ajax, all of the XMLHTTP requests need to be made on the same domain as the site. For example, for the weather feeds, you have to make a request to www.start.com/cfw/weatherlocation.aspx. We had not setup all of the backend services in all of our dev boxes. We had just the frontend stuff. We were pointing to the real live site for all the data services and preference services. We were of course pointing to https://localhost/start for the front end in our dev boxes. With IE, this is ok. You get a security warning, but you can render the page. If you add localhost to trusted sites, you dont even get the security warning. But Firefox is a problem. It just does not work. You cannot even add this a local trusted site zone. So, unfortunately, we had not tested in Firefox when we were developing. We do have a local environment that we use for other kinds of testing, but that was setup a little differently than the live site is. We could not easily use it either. Developers would be writing over each others work.

We found all these problems on Monday and started to fix it. We propped our front end code to various hidden URLs on the live so we could test with Firefox. Steve was just awesome here. He had scripts to automatically copy every devs code out live whenever we wanted. We started fixing bug after bug. Sometime around mid-afternoon Tuesday we thought we could ship that night. But by 1 AM, we were not ready to ship. We did not want ship a product that was broken in either IE or Firefox. I mean, we have bugs, even some serious ones, but we were not going to ship something that did not work for most people. We gave up on Tuesday and reconvened on Wednesday. One of the serious bugs was the sidebar. When you pinned it in Firefox, the entire sidebar would disappear. Now, that would not be very useful for anyone. Steve worked on that for about 3 hours. Noor and I were working on another bug. We had a different design for the Header than the one we shipped. Unfortunately we could not get them to work at the same time on both IE6 and Firefox. If it worked in IE6 it would break Firefox and vice versa. At 2.30 AM, we decided to change the header so we could ship the page. By 3 AM we were live. And then we went home for some well deserved rest :)

I have spent most of the day today reading and replying to customer feedback. You know, we have the best users ever. We get detailed bug reports, with repro steps, specs for modules and everything in between. We just enjoy reading all of this feedback. It makes us want to do more. So keep your feedback coming to startfb-at-microsoft-dot-com.

I am resposible for testing start.com. I will be writing more about what kind of testing we do and how we approach it. Testing a Ajax style website is new for me as well, so i will be learning as i go along. If you guys have found shortcuts and tricks please do share them with me.

- Venkat

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