We're pleased to announce the availability of our V1 release of MSDN Social , TechNet Social , and Expression Social . These new sites, which have been available in preview since May 2008, make it easy for Microsoft's enormous technical community to help...

After several releases focused on improving our site search's usability and usefulness (see posts here and here ), and after seeing both the reaction to demos at TechEd and a few positive blog posts (like this one ), we felt like our search app was ready...

In the last of my series of cool new toys we're adding to extend the new MSDN , TechNet , and Expression social bookmarking sites, we've just posted a set of accelerators for IE8. Thanks to our own Tim Pearson and Husain Shambhoora for creating these...

Continuing our series of cool new stuff you can do with our new social platform, Taylor Parsons has a post fully outlining all the conditions and parameters that you can use to slice and dice social platform queries. Here's some examples using Taylor...

Rahul Soni, a Microsoft field engineer in Bangalore, wrote a Live Writer plug in for including “Add to…” links to a number of social services like Digg, Delicious, Technorati, and Facebook. He’s now updated the plug in to work with Microsoft’s new social...

I’m desperate to blog something work-related, but have been so busy with things I can’t discuss publicly yet that I haven’t made the time. Well, I had a brainstorm for a quick, fun, social computing-related post, so here it is… a text cloud of my friends...

Our social bookmarking preview got a fair bit of attention when it was announced back in May . We've been eager to see how technical professionals will use it, so we decided to take a snapshot and analyzed the first 30 days of data. First, some full disclosure...

John Martin posted today about a few things you should do in the library: bookmark , search with our site search and the new Code Search , try ( loband ), and contribute to the community content . I’ve got a few more hidden gems for you: Show/Hide TOC...

After four days of speaking with a total of 269 developers at PDC in Los Angeles about MSDN Bookmarking , I have a pretty good idea what you think of it. Nearly all of the response at the booth was very positive, with a few in-depth conversations yielding...

This is the start of a series of small posts on some goodies that are sprouting up to make interacting with our new Social apps easier. First up is some FeedFlare that Dan Rigsby created . FeedFlare, according to the FeedBurner site, is designed to...

Another update from our forums team shows how committed they are to rolling out user-driven improvements on a consistent basis. Believe it or not, this was a "between release" release. These guys are cranking hard. Here's the announcement ,...

Image via Wikipedia I’d like to bring a little focus on some of the cool things going on behind the scenes with the Social platform that underpins our search , social bookmarking , and forums apps. We’ve spent the last month optimizing performance for...

Several months ago, we did a deep-dive on MSDN and TechNet search with a dozen users . They were generally impressed, but had some feedback on a few items. We've addressed several of their concerns and more, so I wanted to outline what's better now.....

Kicking things off here, I'd like to ask for general comments on how you use the library. I'd love to just collect some typical stories of how the library saved your skin, how it ticked you off, or what you wish it could do everytime you visit. ...

Tony Soper of virtualization user assistance documentation fame (not to mention a top bookmarker), recorded a podcast with myself and Chris Kilbourn, lead site manager for TechNet. His companion blog post is a great summary of reasons that IT Pros should...

One of the first things we're trying to solve with the library is its isolation from the rest of the great content on MSDN and TechNet. For example, when I'm reading product documentation on Windows Server, how easy is it today to jump over to the KB...

Check out the new Vista centers we launched recently: Vista Dev Center , Vista Tech Center . I'm curious what you all think of the new tab control at the top. The long term vision is more apparent in the prototypes from my last post. We're moving in a...

The number of feeds on MSDN and TechNet sites that are driven by social bookmarking (community members tagging relevant URLs) just keeps growing. The latest adopter is the System Center TechCenter , which has just put “links from the community” front...

We���d like to give kudos to our top bookmarkers as of September 30, 2008. These are the people that are on the leading edge of driving new content onto MSDN and TechNet. I removed a few of the people from our own team, as they’re kind of expected to use...

Yeah, now THESE ads, I like. Not that I minded the Seinfeld ones--good attention-getters--but when they came out, I was hoping that we'd move to something like this quickly. Turns out, the powers that be are at least as smart as I am :) Phew. Windows...

Today we released an update with a number of performance enhancements, some of which I referred to in my previous post . I decided that now was a good time to compare our performance with some other leading sites that we might be compared to. I opened...

Here's the first of what I hope are daily blog entries for TechEd Australia. The goal of the first day was to stay awake all day so that I could reset my body clock and avoid jet lag. So, I walked my butt off. From Darling Harbor up to The Rocks, over...

I couldn't resist getting Azure into the title of my first post from PDC 2008 . The day started with what I'm sure will come to be known as "the keynote that started it all." Ozzie's vision of what cloud-computing will do in the shape of Azure...

Thanks to Chad Brooks, architecture evangelist, for creating a Popfly gadget that displays an RSS feed. He’s using it to expose bookmarks for the upcoming MSDN Developer Conferences . I tweaked it for my blog, as you can see in the right rail. It’s showing...

My one pre-meditated bit of sightseeing while here was to book this day trip to the Blue Mountains. I'm so glad I did. Some fantastic sights, and a very relaxing day overall. Ended the day meeting our Australian sub counterparts over a friendly dinner...