Planet SCM

Some of the most laborious writing that happens in creating Visual Studio doesn't happen in code. I'm talking about the millions (literally) of words that go into the product documentation and other content to support the product. As with most aspects of the product, we thrive on your feedback to help create a better product. See Kathleen McGrath's Weblog for a post (Wanted: Feedback on Visual Studio Content) about the many ways you can contribute feedback about the Visual Studio content.

Gathering customer feedback is a critical part of the Visual Studio documentation process. Your feedback helps us determine whether we are writing the type of content that is most useful to you, and whether we are covering the tasks and scenarios that you need the most help with.

Starting with Visual Studio 2005, we regularly update our online documentation using a continuous publishing process. This enables you to get access to latest version of the documentation quickly and easily. It also gives us the opportunity to respond to feedback that we receive about our documentation and continuously make improvements.

There are several ways you can give us direct feedback, and here are four easy ways to let us know about your experiences with our documentation and how we can improve it.

Source: Kathleen's Weblog : Wanted: Feedback on Visual Studio Content

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If you'd like some insight into what MSDN and TechNet, keep an eye on Justin Grant's new blog - MSDN and TechNet futures and previews.

Hi. I’m Justin Grant, and I’m a product manager for MSDN and TechNet.  My new blog will discuss new features we’re planning on MSDN and TechNet, will review some of the research and thinking behind those features, and most importantly I want to get your feedback so we can ship the right stuff! This is my first blog post ever, so be patient with me in case I don’t do the blogging thing right yet. I’ll learn.

Source: MSDN and TechNet futures and previews

My new team is one of several working with Justin's team on improving the MSDN (and TechNet) experience. But as the cliché goes - it's a marathon, not a sprint.

You may have noticed this week that MSDN Wiki now appears in the regular MSDN Library, which means you can soon use your favorite search engine to find community content in the Library.

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Recently, Scott Swigart interviewed Molly Bostic (MSDN Wiki PM) and I about MSDN Wiki for Dr. Dobb's Journal. The interview is now available online (Dr. Dobb's | MSDN Wiki: What's Up? | November 14, 2006). In it you'll learn about more about MSDN Wiki's origins, where it is today, and where it's headed.

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As someone who participated in the earliest discussions that have since evolved into MSDN Wiki, I wondered how we would mark our milestones of growth and acceptance. I decided today that one of those milestones should be noted authors contributing blocks of content. This was after seeing that Dan Appleman contributed his first block (Alternation Constructs -- Matches include empty groups). It's one block, but it's a start. For anyone who relied as heavily as I did on Dan's Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the Win32 API books, you might be able to appreciate how happy this makes me.

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Tags: msdn wiki

As noted on Soma's blog (Translation Wiki), the Brazilian Portuguese Translation Wiki is now live. This wiki contains the same content as MSDN Wiki, but it has gone through machine translation and human editing to provide that content in Brazilian Portuguese.

In Visual Studio 2005, we shipped documentation in nine languages:

• English
• French
• Italian
• German
• Spanish
• Korean
• Japanese
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Chinese (Simplified)

If developers find value in the translation wiki effort, we'd like to expand it to other languages to make our content available to a more global developer audience.

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Tags: msdn wiki

I haven't blogged about MSDN Wiki since earlier this summer, but there are some new enhancements I'd like to publicize.

First, those who were initially dismayed by the lack of Firefox support should be happy to find that MSDN Wiki now supports Firefox for browsing and editing.

Second, you can subscribe to RSS feeds on a per-contributor basis. That is, if you'd like to know whenever I add something to MSDN Wiki, you can subscribe to this feed on my MSDN Wiki profile:

• Rob Caron MSFT - MSDN Wiki Blocks Created (RSS) 

If you haven't visited MSDN Wiki since it went live earlier this summer, take this opportunity to re-discover it. If you're so inclined, contribute some of your knowledge to it. 

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Tags: msdn wiki