181–190 of 195 posts
now all their links are going to be broken, then they'll change everything again in 2years. typical ms.
Not at all. We do graceful 301 redirects, so for all content from MSDN/TechNet that gets moved, none of the references will break.
Ugh. I'm all for modernizing msdn, but those mouse-over comment bubbles cause a the text underneath to shift - that's just really, really annoying. Mousing over the text causes everything to jump around. Also, the marked-text context menu: that only works within a single paragraph. Cross over to the next and it's not showing any more.
I thought biggest improvement to the MS website, MSDN and technet included, would be simply to disable the incessant demands for feedback on the webpage or surveys. Would you like to take a short 25 minute survey? You visited this site 25,000 times previously and we have asked each of those times, but maybe this time you will change your mind and answer the survey.
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One thing I beg of you: Don't break links to old versions of documents! (I realise this requires building a redirect forest. But we're talking 20 years of MS documentation.)
[Also MS employee that works on the docs.microsoft.com team] No, we will not break links. We are doing graceful redirects from MSDN/TechNet to the new site.
From TFA: "Shortened Article Length Another common piece of feedback was that our content at times can be overwhelming because of its length and that long articles are more difficult to navigate and find what you’re looking for. To address this, we’ve broken down many longer articles into smaller logical steps and provided Previous and Next buttons at the bottom of articles to navigate between steps in a multi-part t…
[Disclosure: I work for the team that built docs.microsoft.com] Thanks for the feedback, and we went through a lot of customer feedback already on this. I'll try to be brief in a response - A good example on why - For our documentation we clearly saw customers jumping around content trying to find the part of the article that helps them. Depending on the article (see point #2) very few people read from beginning to e…
Isn't that what anchor tags are for? You can share them in URLs...
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I also find it hard on my eyes. Looks like it's "Segoe UI" embedded via web fonts. If you compare their screenshot: https://docs.microsoft.com/teamblog/content/images/2016/05/D... To one of mine: https://imgur.com/rFwTqUW It's not even close. Edit: Seems the "blog" portion is very different than the actual docs: https://imgur.com/YKvFxCh
[Disclosure: I work for the team that built docs.microsoft.com] Thanks folks, we had Segoe UI Light on the blog and have switched it to use the same font as our docs!
docs.microsoft.com looks like it will be a very nice upgrade.
I thought biggest improvement to the MS website, MSDN and technet included, would be simply to disable the incessant demands for feedback on the webpage or surveys. Would you like to take a short 25 minute survey? You visited this site 25,000 times previously and we have asked each of those times, but maybe this time you will change your mind and answer the survey.
[Disclosure: working on the team that built docs.microsoft.com] We are fixing that. Thank you for the feedback!
The login proxy (where it checks if you are a user or not and if you should login to track you) really sucked too, I would just use the docs in private browsing mode and it would be 10x faster.
Thanks for your hard work, the new docs look excellent.
I thought Microsoft Open Sourced their docs to Stack Overflow a long time ago?
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Their search capability simply sucks. Unlike google, it seems knowledge from Bing doesn't seep to other parts of the company. Windows store search also sucks. It can't handle misspellings the way Youtube and Chrome store can.
It's not just the builtin search, the way the content is organized always seem be out of line with the way my brain works. As a reference, take a look at (if you're not familiar with it already) at PostgreSQL's manual[1]. With Postgres, I don't need to search, I can (nearly always) find what I need by scanning the table of contents by eyeball. Also, I can download the whole thing as a PDF for offline reading (or prin…
However I'm pretty sure writing excellent documentation must be a very hard task, otherwise it wouldn't be such a rarity. Of course, Microsoft has the resources to do it, but the level of resources required to produce and maintain surely must be decidedly non-trivial. Reasonably, we could conclude they think it provides poor ROI.
We might well beg to differ on that point, and worth saying how much their inadequate documentation reflects the quality and utility of their products.
From TFA: "Shortened Article Length Another common piece of feedback was that our content at times can be overwhelming because of its length and that long articles are more difficult to navigate and find what you’re looking for. To address this, we’ve broken down many longer articles into smaller logical steps and provided Previous and Next buttons at the bottom of articles to navigate between steps in a multi-part t…