Marketing provides the product content that customers read first. This content introduces customers to features, to actions, and to parts of the user interface. Customers will then expect to find those things in the documentation, using the terminology...

Graphic artists and designers are an important part of documentation, but until lately I didn't look into that side of communication very much. After I talked with Monique Bailey, our documentation designer/artist, about how to think visually , I wanted...

I want to use more illustrations and other graphics in our documentation. Graphics can help clarify ideas that are hard to understand from textual explanations, they can add useful redundancy to the communication, and they provide more learning channels...

I was pretty happy with some progress we made today. Just before we took copies of the current version of the docs for an upcoming release, I reviewed the What's New topic (almost the only new content in the doc set--it's very early in the cycle) and...

What is it that programmer writers do? How do they prepare to become programmer writers? I asked Norm Estabrook, a writer on my team, for his thoughts about technical writing. He talked about his writing goals, his preparation for becoming a writer, and...

Developer Division User Education has recently created new positions for content architects. These people work on the overall documentation, instead of concentrating on specific technologies as most of us do. I spoke with the Visual Studio content architect...