After a long week of deployments, patching, migrating of some 600,000+ posts, and more patching, we've finally begun the move off of our old MSDN Forums platform, and onto the new one.

Last week we moved over the following groups of forums:

  • .NET Development
  • Visual Studio
  • Visual Basic
  • Visual C#
  • Visual C++

We've enabled re-direction from the old forums, so if you have a link to one of the forums, or to a post in one of those forums, you'll be automatically sent to the new site after the obligatory "you're being redirected" page appears.

There are a lot of new features on the forums that I'll get into over time, but I want to call out one of my favorites right off the bat.

When you're browsing the list of threads in a forum you'll see a little arrow between the thread title and the icon indicating the thread type (see the area marked with the red rectangle).

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If you click on that arrow you'll see the the thread previewed without reloading the page, like this:

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Right now all you can do from the preview is read the thread and see what post is marked as the answer, but in future updates to the forums you'll see more functionality appear here.

To me, that feature helps eliminate one of the frequent complaints about web forums, that loading the various pages, and navigating through threads, takes up valuable time and can be very slow.  Now, if you're looking for the answer to a question someone else asked, or are just browsing around looking for interesting topics, you can do so without navigating away from your thread list!  Combine that with the filters at the top of the page, and finding posts that you're interested in has never been easier on our site.

Enjoy the new forums, and stay tuned for more discussions about new features and other forums related topics.