A new look for MSDN and TechNet

Great job on the redevelopment of MSDN. Its now easily read. The central content is dynamic and lets you know of current information. The left hand side nicely seperates the technology sections.

While I had to scroll down to see it, its switched the  categorization model to now show what you should be looking from a different perspective.

Overall I think many people will be able to effectively get the information they need.

One suggestion, if it could even be done, is like most other developers I know, its become increasing difficult to keep up to date with all the technologies coming out, especially with .NET. A page showing the latest technologies, such as entity framework, synchronization framework, with just a brief description, maybe categorized in various ways such as ADO, ASP.NET, Visual Studio etc, will let developers know whats coming out and if the technology is right for them.

Currently I stumble across these new technologies, having to read many blogs, mix sessions and newsletters.

While I daily come to MSDN, I believe I will get much more out of it now.

Thanks

Adam

Great, frontpage looks beautiful with localised content for the UK. When I click on a link for Visual C# I get Japanese content! (No I have not configured IE for anything Japanese).

Please can you fix the abomination that is the revamped MSDN Subscriptions download site. Trying to choose things from the 3 levels deep Javascript menu is frustratingly difficult. Showing things that cannot be downloaded by the current subscription level is also highly irritating.

Beg your pardon, it's Chinese and the problem happens in both IE7 and Firefox 3.0RC1.

Come annunciato da Somasegar, sono stati da poco rilasciate due nuove versioni dei rispettivi portali

I like the overall redesign but IMO the the new navigation control on the subscriber downloads site is really difficult to use and taking up too much real estate. If you move the mouse little bit while navigating it jumps around too much.

I liked the old tree control navigation.

Thanks,

Krish

Ben,

The language issue was corrected this morning.  It was an issue of a TOC fragment delayed in our publishing process.  Apologies for the issue it caused.  

If you still are having problems please feel free to contact me directly at dantr@microsoft.com.

Thanks,

Dan

MSDN, TechNet and Expression Team

Krish,

Thanks for the feedback on Downloads control and yes we are working to re-vamp the UX navigation of the benefits for the subscription offering and get a cleaner UX in place for that.

In the meantime we put in an interim navigation option to provide a simple A-Z list.

From this page...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx

Look to the lower left side and click the link “A-Z Product Family List”

That will bring up a easy to navigate page to all your download benefits.

Apologies for the issue and feel free to contact me to discuss or provide input. Look for a new UX control very soon.

Larry W Jordan Jr - Product Unit Manager for the MSDN and TechNet Infrastructure and Services Team

The new look is nice. I especially like the localised info that we see here in the UK. I was somewhat worrying earlier today IUK time) when redirection links to the MSDN forums stopped working, but it all appears to back to normal now.

Soma,

I'd like to second Adam Pedleys suggestion for a more "coherent" way of tracking all the new technologies and other goodies that you guys are pumping out. It's great that there's so much coming out to make my life easier, but keeping up to date, even by regularly perusing blogs.msdn.com and weblogs.asp.net is proving to be a bit of a challenge! :-)

Great job!

I agree with Adam that an overview page explaining the new technologies would be very useful - especially if some links ("read more") about "main technologies" like Entity Framework, Silverlight would be there ... pointing to tutorials like Joe Stebners "data tutorials" (the most outstanding part on MSDN I've ever seen - since 1991).

This would give us the knowledge we need to get most out of the great technologies using best practices and cool new ideas.

Keep on!

Great job!

I agree with Adam that an overview page explaining the new technologies would be very useful - especially if some links ("read more") about "main technologies" like Entity Framework, Silverlight would be there ... pointing to tutorials like Joe Stebners "data tutorials" (the most outstanding part on MSDN I've ever seen - since 1991).

This would give us the knowledge we need to get most out of the great technologies using best practices and cool new ideas.

Keep on!

Looks great.

Now only to come up with a better alternative for the immense tree. Maybe it should not just contains everything in the toc, but it could dynamically be created to contain relevant sections? Anyway, I usually hide the toc because there's just too much. The frontpage and dev centers are way better to get to info quick.

How many documents are on MSDN? 100.000? More?

Also, another request, hope you can send it along:

The breadcrumb control has a dropdown for each item, I find the animation (slowly grows in size) to be unnecessary, I'd prefer it would open directly.

Also, another request, hope you can send it along:

The breadcrumb control has a dropdown for each item, I find the animation (slowly grows in size) to be unnecessary, I'd prefer it would open directly. And they could maybe bring back the hover styles for the links inside the dropdown?

Thanks!!