MSDN Subscriptions web site - February 2009 release

Some of you may or may not have noticed our February release go out last week. The release itself is fairly substantial, but not in ways that you’ll immediately notice – so I’ll highlight some of the changes and issues we’ve seen since releasing these bits into production.

The new features include:

1.  “Super-setting” of your benefits for download and product key claiming purposes. One of the complaints we regularly heard from our users with multiple subscriptions was the fact that to download a file, you first had to select the proper subscription that had permission to the file and then you could download it. With super-setting, if any of your subscriptions entitle you to a download or a product key, you’ll be able to get what you want, based on the aggregation of your subscriptions.

2. Added more information to our “manage” page. Things like the expiration date of your subscription, the level of your subscription, the current status of your subscription, etc.

3. A complete rewrite of our middle tier. The original code for our middle tier was written almost four years ago. Since that time, we’ve had incremental changes patched into the code to handle changes in our partner feeds, changes to the UI and fixes for various bugs. This rewrite has given us a better platform for future development.

Unfortunately, there have been some bugs that didn’t get caught before we released our code into production. The vast majority of them fall into two broad buckets:

1. Users with a mix of expired and active subscriptions are seeing some odd behavior in the various web pages.

2. Product key claims are not working correctly for users that either have a mix of expired and active subscriptions, or users that have a mix of subscriptions that contain an Academic Alliance subscription.

We believe that we have been able to identify the root cause for these issues and the fixes are currently in our test lab. At this time, we expect to release the fixes to production early next week (Wednesday the 18th is our current target).

Please feel free to sign into the blog and contact me privately if you have any questions. After signing in, you can navigate here: https://blogs.msdn.com/user/Profile.aspx?UserID=134865 and you will see an “email” link.

Chris Deluca - Dev Lead, MSDN and TechNet Subscriptions