Windows Desktop Developer Center Updates for 06.10.2011

Not many updates this week, the following changes happened on the developer center:

  • No ads on the center!
  • New code gallery filters are just around the corner
  • Use this not this for this week

No ads on the center
Last week, our publishing and hosting team updated all of the developer centers to have advertisements (banners that were on the right rail) removed from the centers.  This is really exciting for the developer center teams because we've been pushing them to remove them for a few years now and finally we've gotten the centers clean!  You can see some great examples of pages that historically had advertisements on them but now don't such as:

The list goes on across the site.  The only promotional content that currently appears on the center is the MSDN subscriptions content, which in all truth, should be somewhat valuable for you guys because it can be tough to find the links and content from the rest of the center.

New Code Gallery Filter for Windows
Last week, I had a meeting with the manager for developments on Code Gallery and discovered they have been secretly working on a branded and scoped code gallery that will summarize the shipping samples for Windows.  I was promised it yesterday but still haven't heard further developments about it but hopefully some time in the near future there will be a developer experience on the MSDN Code Gallery that is scoped to Windows.  As a sneak preview, you can see all the C++ Windows Desktop samples on Code Gallery.

Use this not this
This week, I was forwarded some helpful information from the Microsoft Support team with guidance on the best way to setup telemetry, logging, and error reporting when developing Windows apps.  Their guidance, generically, is to use the Event Tracing for Windows API to ensure that you are performing logging consistently with other products in the Windows family and can easily take advantage of the large ecosystem of logging and support infrastructure that ETW enables.  Check out the article, Use this not this: Logging / Event Tracing to learn more about ETW and to download an article and code sample for this scenario.

See Also