Focusing community discussions for IE development on StackOverflow

In an effort to focus Web development discussions for Internet Explorer in one place, we have starting migrating IE development discussions from MSDN forums to Stack Overflow. This has started with announcing to our MSDN community the goal of redirecting all Web development questions to the Internet Explorer tag(s) on Stack Overflow to better answer your questions.

This decision reflects the belief on the IE team that Stack Overflow is not only a rapidly-growing community of broadly-disciplined engineers, but a great place to get timely and reliable support on Web standards, and cross-browser development. We are proud to sponsor the Internet Explorer tag on Stack Overflow and are joining other teams around Microsoft such as OneDrive and Azure in helping to direct our developers to the Stack Overflow community.

Since its conception over six years ago, Stack Overflow has racked up over 40,000 questions, and nearly 70,000 answers in the IE family of tags. The effectiveness of the community is something individual members of the IE team have personally witnessed over the years. Whatever problem you face, there is a good chance Stack Overflow already has the answer.

With our increased focus and adoption of standards, involvement in standards bodies, and continued cooperation with other browser vendors, it makes sense to consolidate Web development discussions on the Web around a common community.

So far this month, 52 questions have been asked on MSDN. In the same span of time over 600 questions have been asked on Stack Overflow, and have received over 600 answers. Stack Overflow has a healthy and mature process, a powerful search engine, excellent community-oriented features, and more. We are very excited to watch as it continues to shape and mold the Web-development industry.

In recent months the Internet Explorer team has sought out opportunities to create dialogues with the community. We have hosted a Reddit AMA and regular sessions on Twitter where you can #AskIE anything you would like to know about our team, process, and/or product. To further these efforts, we will be organizing our efforts to contribute as well to the Internet Explorer tags on Stack Overflow to maintain a high level of quality for the sake of the Web, and the community.

As is the case on Stack Overflow, we will at times identify features we would like to see in the browser and bugs we would like to resolve. Feature requests should still ultimately be routed to uservoice.modern.ie, and bugs and issues should still be filed at connect.microsoft.com/IE.

We look forward to your feedback in the comments or via @IEDevChat. If you are not already using Stack Overflow, get started today. We will see you there!

— Jonathan Sampson (@jonathansampson), Program Manager, Internet Explorer