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installing locally and refreshing content...

Couple of thoughts on how a user would install content locally and how they could refresh content...

  • For offline use, (or if your internet connection isn't as fast as you'd like), a user could choose to install an “SDK”... For example, the user could choose to install the Longhorn SDK, and they'd get all the related content locally.
  • By default the SDK would always go to the local content (if it's available locally of course), and a background process would update the content so most of the time the local content is as upto date at the online content. If the content has not been downloaded by the user, the SDK would retrieve it from the MSDN website.
  • The user could be viewing a specific page, and if they think it may be out of date (the background process hasn't got around to updating that page yet), but they want it updated NOW, they could click on the “Force a refresh” of this page button.
  • The user could also choose to subscribe to a single piece of content instead of a whole SDK... for example I want to read the “parsing regular expressions” from the MSDN website and I could choose to take that piece of content offline (and also choose to mark it for synchronization each time the background process runs)

Thoughts? Do let me know by clicking the feedback button below!

Published Tuesday, February 17, 2004 11:32 AM by harisekhar

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# re: installing locally and refreshing content...

Tuesday, February 17, 2004 11:46 AM by Munish Gupta
Sounds great as long as I can choose what content should be kept "up-to-date" by the background process.

One more suggestion: It would be nice if I am able to add some of my own comments to a page (just locally ofcourse). Sometimes the standard explanation is not good enough and I find better description/code/etc somewhere on the net/groups/blogs. After some time you loose track of those things and next time you have to go through the cycle again. If I can someehow attach that content to the page (by links or just copy-paste) than it would be a great help.

# re: installing locally and refreshing content...

Tuesday, February 17, 2004 2:52 PM by Simon Owen
All sounds great. Also how about an intelligent system - if I start hanging around a lot in the regular expression area then give that priority on the update cycle.

And I agree with Munish, being able to add your own refrences for later referal would be a massive plus

# re: installing locally and refreshing content...

Sunday, February 22, 2004 10:50 AM by Mitch Walker
- I think the client should be smarter about getting updates rather than requirin the user to click a "Force a refresh" on a page by page basis.

- This should happen implicitly. If a user views a page that is not part of a "subscription", it should be cached and the client will periodically check for updates. Again, not requiring explicit action from the user.

# re: installing locally and refreshing content...

Friday, February 27, 2004 8:23 PM by Jason Bower
I think the idea of downloading and keeping content available offline would be great but what I would like to know if what people think about whether the SDK should be installed on a per-machine, or per-user basis.

My general thought is that the user experience should be per-user, but the content should be per-machine. I can't think of any reason to have a duplicate set of content for each user. This makes sense for documentation content, but what about tools and development environment files. Should every user with access to a machine be able to setup and configure their own independent development environment or should the development environment exist on a per-machine basis so that everyone has the same experience on a machine.


# re: installing locally and refreshing content...

Sunday, March 07, 2004 7:18 AM by Stephane Rodriguez
"This should happen implicitly. If a user views a page that is not part of a "subscription", it should be cached and the client will periodically check for updates. Again, not requiring explicit action from the user."

I smelll something bad about this "always online" behavior you are picturing. Why that? I hope that the platform you are building will not require developers to be online only to use the doc, especially if it's all supposed to be installed already.
Hope all of those funky online features are optional, and off by default.

# installing locally and refreshing content...

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