Inside MSDN and TechNet : Library

Launching lightweight Beta view for MSDN library!

aram — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:12:00 GMT

The Library Experience (LEX) team is proud to announce the release of " lightweight beta view" for MSDN library ! Please check-out the new library view at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system(lightweight).aspx . We blogged about ScriptFree (loband)...(read more)

MSDN: "The Highlander" and there will be only one!

larryj — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:39:00 GMT

Building and evolving the MSDN site is a challenge. I am not stating this to try to impress you with a “gee that is hard" vibe, but to acknowledge that when you run systems and sites that have histories that span multi-year life cycles (decades wrt MSDN <g/>), you have a whole different responsibility to the people who depend worldwide on what you do. Even the simplest, flip decision can have impact on the productivity of people who make their living supporting, implementing, writing applications and defending your efforts. We take this responsibility very seriously and it is imperative that we make the best decisions to keep developers minimally impacted by things we do on MSDN in the Library and still move productivity forward.

We set out on journey to re-build MSDN (and now TechNet and Expression as we have on-boarded their businesses to our platform) as a data driven system that could scale to the large amount of documents that we knew it would house over time. These plans pushed us faster than we even imagined as Visual Studio became a juggernaut of release candidates, community technical previews and beta's with each documentation release needing us to be more flexible and performant. Today the MSDN system houses around 11 million documents in SQL Server.

We started the new system to release with Visual Studio 2005 and it has progressed a great deal in that time. I will blog on that in another post. One of the persistent issues that was hanging out there and bugged you and really bugged me, was the continued existence of the classic MSDN cluster that housed a mixed bag of older, localized library content and other disparate sites that had not been orginally prioritized to migrate to the new system when we built MSDN2. The good news is that we applied some folks from the team who are really good at being persistent and they managed to work with the teams and get all the content migrated and off the old system. Yesterday we shut off the old cluster and today we finished the collapse of the URL into just http://MSDN.Microsoft.com!

Now all URL’s point to the same site and same content.

My apologies for the time it took to finish this and I look forward to your feedback.

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

New Controls and the Wiki Annotation Editor

larryj — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:05:00 GMT

The Telerik Editor is now implemented as the Wiki Annotation Editor across the MSDN and TechNet libraries. You can see a sample by clicking here...

Here is the our release status…

Community Content: Telerik Editor (replaces inline custom editor)

This work involved moving the new Telerik Prometheus HTML editor (see www.telerik.com for more details) into MTPS rendering and using it to replace the custom inline editor for Community Content. In addition to a great WYSIWYG editing experience, all of our controls have been updated to improve page load performance and we have added support for the MTPS Code snippet control which will provide users a similar code markup and syntax highlighting that library pages currently enjoy as well as the "copy code" functionality. We also gave a new clean look and feel to the Community Content controls.

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

New Package This! - Supports Community Content

larryj — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 02:55:00 GMT

You can take it with you!

The new 1.3 version of version of Package This! Now supports exporting Community Content to .hxs and .chm files. It is also simplified into a single .exe.

You can download from CodePlex @ http://www.codeplex.com/packagethis/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=12172

Package This is a GUI tool written in C# for creating help files (.chm and .hxs) from the content obtained from the MSDN Library or the TechNet Library via the MSDN Content Service. You select the content you want from the table of contents, build a help file, and use the content offline. You are making personalized ebooks of MSDN or TechNet content. Both help file formats also give full text search and keyword search.

The Community Content feed is @ http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/community-edits(rss).aspx

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

Interested in Helping us Shape the Next Version of the MSDN Library?

larryj — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:32:00 GMT

We have put a facebook group together to aggregate together the folks who want to work with us to provide feedback, usability and ideas for the next generation of the MSDN Library. We call this project Library 3.0 and we will be organizing events and presentations from this group to bring us together on the project. My goal is build quorum of members over the next months with kickoff’s in late May for the first events.

Join the “Friends of the MSDN Library” Group on facebook : http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16125221070

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

MSDN Library Performance Update

larryj — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 01:04:00 GMT

You have told us in many forums and blog posts over the last year that the continued corpus of documentation and features in the MSDN library has affected the page weights and site performance and we have heard you. In response, we kicked off a project to address these issues and look at the technologies around ASP.NET AJAX and to use it even more comprehensively across the site. We also dug deep into the TOC page weight and bytes between the client and the server.

We launched this into our labs and iterated until we had the right things in place. The whole of MSDN2 went through a significant re-write of our rendering approaches and we launched those updates into production today. The MSDN library is snappier and the TOC maps to the content quickly and in sync with your library navigation. Overall we are pleased with the results and considering the 10m documents in all the of languages we are hosting today, it is nice to see Microsoft technologies like SQL Server 2005 and ASP.NET continue to differentiate in one of most demanding environments that my team manages.

Here's a little reading trick for you, when you want to toggle the TOC to read the article in the full width of the browser, just press the letter "T" on your keyboard to hide and toggle the TOC control from the page.

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