What's new in the Visual Studio 2010 Web performance and load test documentaion (Part One)

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This blog is about what we've tried to do to improve the overall documentation. If you want to see the documentation on the new features for Web performance and load testing, see: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff400219.aspx.

For *Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, the documentation team (includes me) took a new approach to how the documentation is presented. In prior releases, we generally were much more feature centric, but for Visual Studio 2010 we identified key customer scenarios and tried to create content around them. This strategy was developed by soliciting feedback from numerous customers in various venues. I for one, talked with dozens of customers and received some great feedback to help us improve the documentation. As part of this strategy we used a new model for our high-level introduction topics. The new topics provide much more detail and tables with information about the content contained in the section. For example, compare these two topics from Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010:

You can also see that the new table of contents (below) is structured around user scenarios or tasks. Now, when you search the internet (Bing of course), you'll likely land on a topic and have supporting content in the same vicinity. The tables in the new introduction topics also contain links to related tasks which should make navigating to related content easier. Additionally, we also attempted to make our topic titles more specific in order to achieve better search results.

Note   Consider using the feedback option within the following topics to give me your opinion on this strategy in addition to any errors of omissions you might find.

Testing Application Performance and Stress

In part two, I'll blog about our extensive use of screenshots in the content.

* I specifically contributed to the Visual Studio Ultimate product documentaion. This new appraoch was also braodly applied to other Visual Studio content too.