October 19, 2009
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New location (and look) for ASP.NET documentation
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1366 hit(s)
ASP.NET documentation actually has a couple of homes. There's the grab-bag of articles, tutorials, and videos about ASP.NET that's posted on the http://asp.net site. And the official documentation -- the stuff I work on -- lives on MSDN, the gigantic library of Microsoft information.
We released Beta 2 of the .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 today. As part of the docs push, we managed a change that we've actually been wanting to make for a long time. Since approximately forever, our stuff has been part of the overall Visual Studio documentation, and it's taken some digging to find it:
Whereas all this time we've had this other node in MSDN that seemed like it would make a good home for our docs. And as of today, that's where you'll find our stuff:
The new organization reflects a couple of things. One, obviously, is that if you're scanning the MSDN table of contents (TOC) looking for ASP.NET stuff, a pretty likely place to look is in a node that's about Web development. We wanted to reduce the clicking required to get to the doc, of course. Another change is that because the docs are not tied specifically to versions of Visual Studio, you can see that we can keep ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET 3.5 documentation close to each other in the TOC.[1]
Notice that we also have the MVC docs nearby. We debated how best to organize the MVC docs w/r/t the main ASP.NET docs. The MVC development team understandably does not want to suggest that there's this thing called ASP.NET, see, and then there's this other thing called MVC. But it's a logistical problem for us, because the MVC team versions their stuff more frequently (more agile-y) than the .NET+VS releases go out. Plus the versions don't necessarily align -- you can use MVC 2.0 on ASP.NET 3.5. In the end, we went with having the MVC docs close to, but not underneath, ASP.NET docs.
Anyway, as part of the B2 release, the folks at MSDN debuted an overhaul of the MSDN site. It's, like, prettier. :-) And it has been reorganized. And -- this is the part I think is way cool -- there are now two alternative views (three total, eh?).
There's "Classic," which is the MSDN we all know (but prettier); there's "ScriptFree" (known as "loband" during its testing phase); and there's now "Lightweight Beta." ScriptFree is intended to be very lo-band indeed. It's amazingly fast for those of us used to MSDN, but I often find that the keyhole TOC a little too sparse. I'm really pleased with Lightweight view, which is fast but retains the structural elements that I've come to rely on. I even like the page design better than in Classic view.
Incidentally, if you go to ScriptFree view, the view-switch UI changes (no script, right?). It's up at the top:
I won't blather more about the MSDN redesign right this second, coz lots of other people have had lots to say about it (e.g. new design, loband). However, there are a couple more things about Lightweight view that I really like that I'll note later.
Let us know what you think, good or bad, about the new location of the docs, about the way we organize the TOC withal, and of course about MSDN!
And speaking of MSDN, maybe I should go do some work now. :-)
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