Today marks the first release from my current project.  I silently moved on from blogs to focus on the video experience on the MSDN and TechNet sites.  The results of that work are showing up for the first time today.  We’ve done a couple things on the back-end part of the experience that aren’t really visible to the naked eye that we believe will set us up to scale in the future, and we’ve also done a couple of cool new user oriented features.

1) Ratings!  You’ll now be able to rate the videos in the VB DevCenter on a 5 star rating system.  This feature actually existed awhile back and was removed, since we’re using the same DB you may see videos that already have ratings associated with them.

2) Comments!  You can now comment on video pages.  You have to be signed in on the site to leave a comment, but you’ll now be able to comment on a video much like you would a blog post.  You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on a particular video if you want to follow the discussion.

3) Consistent layout!  Previously there were several variations on layout being used even within the VB DevCenter.  Now all VB videos should have a consistent placement of elements on the page and consistent naming of links.

4) Top Ten Videos!  On the right hand rail of the video pages you’ll see the top ten VB videos listed.  This is a step towards our making video content easier to navigate without having to go back to the rollup pages.

I’m really excited about this release.  Today we’re covering around 100 pages in the VB DevCenter and if all goes well we’ll be looking at how we broaden the scope soon.

Video page before:

Video page after: