MSDN vs MSDN2: What Links to Use
I'm Will Mason, and I manage the developer documentation team for Internet Explorer. We write the documentation for HTML, DHTML, CSS, WebBrowser Control , etc. that you can find in the MSDN Library.
You might have noticed lately that the MSDN site has changed its domain name to MSDN2. Beginning last fall, the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) group has been using a new publishing tools and had to keep the content published with the old tools separate from the new. As you have probably figured out, MSDN2 is the site that uses the new tools.
You might also have noticed that the URLs have changed more than just in the domain name. To keep our file names unique, the file names are for the most part now page IDs, rather than page titles. For example, "item" is a property of many objects and there are several "item" topic pages in the Library. The IDs make sure that no two "item" topic pages can have the same URL.
Over the winter, documentation sets were slowly migrated from one domain to the other. At some point in the future, the MSDN2 domain will once again become just MSDN and will keep the new scheme for file names.
So, what does this mean to you? Well, actually not much. If you're creating links today, you will have to use the MSDN2 URLs. Old URLS that point to MSDN (the old domain name) are redirected to MSDN2, so you don't have to worry about them.
If you link to MSDN2 pages, redirects will be put in place when MSDN2 reverts to MSDN. These redirects will not go away. Over time, you might want to correct them, but they will always work.
For more on the reasons behind these changes, please see https://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/02/InsideMSDN/default.aspx. Keep watching the https://msdn2.microsoft.com for more information.
- Will
Comments
Anonymous
May 30, 2007
thanks, Will! I'm glad someone finally explained this. i'm glad msdn now displays properly in vista, also :) images were broken for months.Anonymous
May 30, 2007
So does this mean that the samples/documentation will get fixed from: <HORRIBLE OUT="of date" TAGS="and" ATTRIBUTES=quoteless>This is not how HTML should look.</HORRIBLE> (below square brackets used instead of angled to avoid deletion) [HORRIBLE OUT="of date" TAGS="and" ATTRIBUTES=quoteless]This is not how HTML should look.[/HORRIBLE] It is the first thing on MSDN that indicates that most of the content is over half a decade out of date.Anonymous
May 30, 2007
I take it creating human-readable URLs for all the documents would be too big a task? Many would have to be extremely long to ensure their uniqueness, so it's a good balance to do this for the ones which are easy. Great to see a real-life example of how to use redirects to prevent linkrot in an enterprise-scale web application. :)Anonymous
May 30, 2007
when will you autoupdate IE7 in korea,china and japan? we want to autoupdate ie7 in korea,china and japan because of idn(international domain names)Anonymous
May 30, 2007
Great job! It's really much better now. And it also works in Firefox. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/aa740474.aspx One minor point: the url's are quite ugly now. (And looking at the html-code: that's quite ugly too. Using "<a href='javascript:...'>" is a bit outdated, but okay, it works.)Anonymous
May 30, 2007
Why is MSDN2 so much slower than MSDN especially under IE7. Every click seems to cause teh left menu set to be reloaded in it's entirety and re-rendered as a menu. Why does this menu have to constantly reload?Anonymous
May 30, 2007
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May 30, 2007
The DHTML is cool and the design looks good overall. Are the web pages for each division of Microsoft's website designed by people in those divisions or are there some full time employees dedicated to that task?Anonymous
May 30, 2007
The MSDN2 pages load very slow and look terrible when opening a new link in a small windowpane in IE6. Also losing the verbose links is a loss as they made it easier to navigate and interprete links.Anonymous
May 31, 2007
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May 31, 2007
@Scott: What part of "Extension to HTML" implies to you that this is a part of a standard? This text explicitly means that the element is not defined in a HTML standard. Regardless of whether or not a given tag is "standard" or even desirable, they all need to be documented.Anonymous
May 31, 2007
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/317739_msftpatent30.html assuming this news article is correct things could get interestingAnonymous
May 31, 2007
The most annoying thing about MSDN (and MSDN2) library online to me is that if you click something in the tree on the left, it will always refresh the ENTIRE page. C'mon guys...maybe you can AJAX-ify this thing. It should only need to refresh the content area.Anonymous
May 31, 2007
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June 01, 2007
Interesting notice: have you ever seen non-security IE update? I haven't. So the bugs really aren't fixed anymore =) Sad but trueAnonymous
June 01, 2007
(bug report) In no add-ons mode, a web page allocates all available virtual memory. If I'd be using a pagefile, my system would have stopped responding. IE7/XP Home SP2 - severity unknown. To view the URL of this page, visit http://preview.tinyurl.com/yu2onz Please allow e-mail or web based bug reports without a sign-up procedure.Anonymous
June 01, 2007
(bug report) In no add-ons mode, a web page allocates all available virtual memory. If I'd be using a pagefile, my system would have stopped responding. IE7/XP Home SP2 - severity unknown. To view the URL of this page, visit http://preview.tinyurl.com/yu2onz Please allow e-mail or web based bug reports without a sign-up procedure.Anonymous
June 01, 2007
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June 01, 2007
@TMaster: The page in question is using Chunked Encoding to deliver at least 40+ megabytes. How large is the page in question?Anonymous
June 01, 2007
@TMaster: Given sufficient memory and CPU time, that page will render. The bulk of the page (39.7 out of 39.8mb) is made up of 2,647,632 empty table cells.Anonymous
June 02, 2007
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June 02, 2007
Fduch: Please see http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/927917Anonymous
June 02, 2007
@ EricLaw Eric, thanks for standing up in this forum, where you have to work in a sometimes very hostile environment. In your reply to Fduch you quote a KB article. If I follow that link, I get the German translation of this article (I am using a German 2K3 SVR and German IE7). I would rather prefer to get to the original, as the translations often loose precition in the process of translating. Is there a way to get the original EN-US version by default? Thanks! HarryAnonymous
June 03, 2007
Mr Mason, 1- When will your MSDN2 team upgrade the coding practices in MSDN2 webpages, in the provided examples, etc? 2- MSDN2 webpages have thousands and thousands of validation markup errors, CSS parsing errors, deprecated coding practices, incorrect/wrong coding practices, etc.. When is all that going to be addressed, tackled, roadmapped and fixed? 3- The old MSDN used to have interactive examples. When is that going to come back? 4- All of MSDN2 webpages use unsemantic markup code. Nested tables and deeply nested tables is frequently seen. Over-constrained tables (<table width="100%" ...> and <td width="100%">) is a frequent (but wrong) practice at MSDN2. Tables used for layout is very frequent at MSDN2. When is all that going to change? 5- Even the content of many MSDN2 webpages has errors or is confusing, misleading. Even diagrams, schemas which are supposed to help understanding have mistakes and serious errors. When is this going to be addressed? Gérard TalbotAnonymous
June 04, 2007
EricLaw [MSFT]: I looked at your link. At first I thout taht's not the case because all other pages worked, but then I foun someone made javascript insertion on that particular page and it really did document.body.appendChild. It's good that MS acknowledges the bug though I wonder when that article was first written...Anonymous
June 04, 2007
@harry_richter: I'm not sure if there's a way to do this by default, but if you add "/en" to the end, it appears to work.... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927917/en @fduch: The article in question was written sometime around IE7B3/RC1Anonymous
June 04, 2007
ashamed by his spelling errorsAnonymous
June 05, 2007
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June 06, 2007
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June 06, 2007
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June 07, 2007
IE doesn't need fixing, it's the management.Anonymous
June 08, 2007
Please don't listen to the calls for dropping the "obsolete" msdn ASP/DHTML/HTML/js/IIS pages. These are some of the BEST documents available. They can be very difficult to find sometimes. It would be great if the current docs included examples. They used to make sample apps and examples. Now, just sample apps. Who wants to spend 2 hrs digging for 3 lines of code? And some employers think a web app written 5 yrs ago only needs maintenance and not a rewrite to .Net. Go figure.Anonymous
June 08, 2007
I'm getting this error sometimes: SysFader: iexplore.exe - Application Error: The instruction at "0x3019fd88" referenced memory at "0x0bbcf000". The memory could not be "written". and if kills IE7. How to fix it? I couldn't find any useful info though I see I'm not the only one getting this error.Anonymous
June 08, 2007
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June 11, 2007
looks like Safari 3 (beta) installs and runs just fine on Windows 2000. too bad you IE devs can't get a version of 7 on win2k. Oh well, i guess the apple (mozilla/opera) devs are just better.Anonymous
June 11, 2007
A brilliant idea for a new feature in the next version of Internet Explorer - a built- in advertisement blocker that will hide any recognizable commercial banner or text ad INCLUDING ADSENSE. Sure it will harm google, hard (:D). but its a legitimate feature that will not come on default (although will be easly enabled by those who wish it.)Anonymous
June 12, 2007
@ d.braun I have developed a replacement for the Google Toolbar that includes a feature to block Google AdSense as well ;-) http://www.quero.at/