A New Look is Coming to MSDN – See a Preview on the VB Dev Center

Published 07 October 09 09:25 PM

Today MSDN released a preview of what’s to come later this month on the Visual Basic Developer Center. You should notice an URL at the top that directs you to check out the preview:

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Besides the cool colors you’ll see a better layout on the home page for easier navigation. Essential resources are centered right in the middle with a rotator of sorts that allows you to pick a tab on the left to hone in on the content you want on the right. You’ll see featured articles and library content, VB team and MVP blog posts, our Channel 9 videos, and VB samples & projects on Code Gallery and Codeplex all right there in the middle of the page.

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Of course, content is king, and you’ll still be seeing great Visual Basic content rolling out here on the Dev Center. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff in our pipeline! Stay tuned for more awesome “How Do I” Videos!

I mentioned that we added ratings and comments on the videos a while back (and I’ve been keeping up with them ;-)), but now we also have a video scroller that lets you browse the most popular videos with ease. You’ll see this control on the home page (at the bottom) as well as the learn page and soon we’ll also be able to see the ratings and views right here as well.

There’s a lot more coming on MSDN but take a look at the site and give us your feedback in the MSDN feedback forum where folks from MSDN will be participating. Of course, you can always tell me your thoughts here as well and I’ll get them back to the right folks.

Enjoy!

by Beth Massi
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# Waleed El-Badry said on October 8, 2009 6:47 AM:

What I like the most  besides the new outfit is the essential resources section. It is good to see that refreshing the whole page to update a portion of it is gone for good (I guess thanks to AJAX technology).

Furthermore, the silverlight based amazing featured Videos list keeps me busy by clicking the below tabs to see the animation effect :-)  

# Michael Rockwell said on October 8, 2009 10:48 AM:

What I would like to see is for MSDN to get smart and start profiling my activity so that it can then prioritize the content that is displayed for me.  The amount of content is both an advantage and disadvantage.  I want MSDN to learn about me based upon my searches and navigation so that it can prioritize the information displayed to be more specific to what I do.  For example if I am an ASP.Net developer that uses VB.Net, MSDN should know that and give content in these areas higher priority.  Also if I am looking at WCF, LINQ, and TFS for eample these technologies should get weighted into the decision as to what information is displayed in the navegation options.  Also, it would be nice if I could create web slices based upon my profile so that I get notified of new related content.  Perhaps work with the Bing folks to incorporate decision intelligence into to MSDN.

# Ken Cox [MVP] said on October 8, 2009 11:10 AM:

Hi Beth,

The overall design is good with lots emphasis on the available content.

However, the use of motion graphics on the pages is a very bad choice. It makes it tough to view for those of us with vertigo. Please tell them not to make anything move, blur, or wipe except when the user makes it happen with a click.

Ken

# Beth Massi said on October 8, 2009 12:05 PM:

Waleed - LOL. Thanks for the feedback.

Michael - I totaly agree with you and longer term that is the plan; to have an integrated user profile across forums, galleries and the dev centers so you can do exactly that.

Ken- (Hi!) are you referring to the center of the page? I'll send them your feedback about that. I think the blury text is definitely an issue, but I think the rotation could be helpful for first time users so they could be aware of all the content underneath. I agree that once you're familiar with the page it could cause headaches.

# Waleed El-Badry said on October 9, 2009 1:03 PM:

I guess Michael wants the behavior already implemented by Google (Google Analytics).

In my humble opinion, although I totally agree with him that it makes the website smarter, it has its side effect on speed of navigation and perhaps privacy of data collection.

I have no doubt that we all agree to request from Beth to comeback to Windows Forms Development after this journey VSTO. Otherwise, my colleagues and I shall migrate to Office Development and become an MS Office Boys :-)

Have a wonderful day.

# Logan said on October 13, 2009 11:29 PM:

Hi Beth,

I love the new look. It gives me ideas about things to try on my site (although mine is still asp classic - I'm having a hard time learning asp.net >.<

I know it's likely a really small thing, but I've just found a typo on the following page:

Visual Basic Developer Center > Learn > New to Development

(URL): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbpreview/ms789097.aspx

On the last link under Development Concepts, "Language" is missing an E at the end of the word.

Enjoy your day :)

# Martin said on October 15, 2009 7:22 AM:

The main reason I hit MSDN is to get to the documentation section. What I'd like is something like a Search bar for the MSDN Library, with autocomplete for objects/methods/etc.

So I can start typing System.Web. ... and in an Intellisense-type way, the members are listed.

Also, where I don't know the full namespace for an object (e.g. SqlRoleProvider), I could type SqlRoleProvider and have it autocomplete to the full namespace.

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About Beth Massi

Beth is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft and is responsible for producing and managing content for business application developers, driving community features and team participation onto MSDN Developer Centers (http://msdn.com), and helping make Visual Studio one of the best developer tools in the world. She also produces regular content on her blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi), Channel 9, and a variety of other developer sites and magazines. As a community champion and a long-time member of the Microsoft developer community she also helps with the San Francisco East Bay .NET user group and is a frequent speaker at various software development events. Before Microsoft, she was a Senior Architect at a health care software product company and a Microsoft Solutions Architect MVP. Over the last decade she has worked on distributed applications and frameworks, web and Windows-based applications using Microsoft development tools in a variety of businesses. She loves teaching, hiking, mountain biking, and driving really fast.

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