MSDN - Where Developers Come First

When developers want to learn how to build software on Microsoft platforms, finding content and connecting with others should be easy. Microsoft Developer Network offers Help documentation, articles, blog posts, videos, and forums to more than 20 million unique visitors every month.

Over the last few months the MSDN team has made hundreds of updates to the MSDN website. Many of these are subtle changes you may not notice directly, but together they help developers easily find current, relevant information on the site using a consistent look and feel. I want to share with you two changes that capture the essence of the updates.

Context is Everything

We’ve received strong feedback from the community that developers want to stay within the context of their language’s Developer Center as much as possible as they navigate content on MSDN. Using that feedback, the MSDN team rolled out an update to the MSDN Forums which integrates the forums into the Developer Center experience. When a Visual Basic Developer Center user clicks on the Forums tab, the user now sees only the Visual Basic forums. Having a consistent user experience and location ensures the content and activities you care about are relevant and related.

 

VB Forums

This forums update had many other features, including a new faster-loading rich text editor, updates to Top Answerers lists to show contributions over the last 30 days, and the capability for moderators to “Mark as Answer” in thread preview.

Make Your Voice Heard

Getting feedback from the community is essential to making MSDN better. To make it easier to share your ideas and suggestions on improving MSDN, we have added a Site Feedback link at the bottom of every page (excluding the library). Clicking on this link displays a separate window where your comments can be entered.

Site Feedback

Clicking the Submit button generates an email which is sent directly to the MSDN team. The team reads every mail and uses your suggestions to better understand the types of issues the community is running into on the site and to fix reported problems. As always, you can report a problem with a Microsoft product on Microsoft Connect or ask product questions on the MSDN forums.

I’ve highlighted two examples of the many changes we have made to MSDN to provide a better experience for developers online. Connect with millions of developers already on MSDN and send your feedback to help us make MSDN even better in the future.

Namaste!