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UVB-76

Let's not forget the 'Live' phase.

Windows Live, Live Calendar, Live Contacts, Live Messenger, Live Photos, Live Mail...

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Or "Visual", even though none of the products are actually any more visual than their competition.

To be fair, the original Visual Basic was indeed much more visual than the competition.

They messed it up with Visual C++ which wasn't visual at all (unless raw Win32/MFC code is someone's idea of beautiful scenery).

Actually, to this day there are no (or at least few, we could debate about Qt Designer) C++ tools that will let you draw a UI, then double-click the button to enter the code of what should happen when you click that button. Is it pretty, or easy to learn how it works under the hood? No. Does it work, and work well? Yes.

Also "Visual J++", or, as I called it, "Visual J Double-Plus Ungood".

Visual Studio has a very good and well integrated visual GUI builder.

Is it anymore "Visual" than, say, XCode, or any other GUI builder?

Visual Studio is called like that since 1995 and XCode is around since 2003.

By the time is came out, Visual Studio was actually very visual in comparison with their competition.

There was more to the Skylight rebrand than Live. The idea was to bind the services to the Windows brand, a strong brand in the US, instead of MSN, which is a stronger brand outside the US.

Also, the integration was tighter, so the experience was supposed to be seamless. YMMV. It wasn't like we grabbed a can of "Live" spraypaint and hit everything we could see.

> It wasn't like we grabbed a can of "Live" spraypaint and hit everything we could see.

To me, it sure seemed that way. Went from a perfectly usable, lightweight "MSN Messenger 4.0" client to some slow-as-molasses abomination "Live Messenger".

As I said the very sentence before, the goal was a smooth integration, but your mileage my vary. Restated, I know it ended up sucking, but that wasn't the goal.

I remember my time there from MSN to LIVE to BING to YA!BING

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