Cote tipped me off to a really fresh new wiki on MSDN for Visual Studio. It appears that they’ve compiled a lot of developer tips and tricks in scattered locations on the MSDN site, and this wiki is the initial move towards pulling it all together, with an eventual move to put the info from the wiki into the TechNet documentation collection.
They just opened for business so to speak last Thursday (June 8, 2006), and they’ve already got over 300 community content blocks. Their guidelines say to use the wiki to add code examples and other short bits of useful information, not to use it for long discussions or bug requests, which makes sense. So far the few code examples I’ve read through look useful, so I think it’ll become a great repository while you’re perusing the reference information. All of the content I looked at so far appears to be imbedded with the reference information.
You definitely need to use IE to browse through the content — they intend to support Firefox eventually but for now the display is pretty horrid in Firefox (extra scrolling due to extra separate textboxes.) It’s also English only to begin with, with some Brazilian Portuguese machine transation.
It’s interesting that they’ve added another source for information. One commenter on one of the team member’s blogs noted that there are no less than five locations within the Microsoft domain where you can find similar content.
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/
- http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/
- http://windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com/library/
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/ and now
- http://msdnwiki.microsoft.com
I am definitely going to follow their wiki development with interest. Will they have trouble with sabotage or graffiti of sorts on the wiki, causing more maintenance? Will they test the code snippets eventually to ensure quality posts? Do they have someone constantly doing care and feeding and protection of the wiki, or is that just not necessary as the community patrols and corrects itself? Is most of the community internal to Microsoft so sabotage is unthinkable? What would they do with conflicting advice on the same topic? Geez, can I make wiki documentation sound more like a soap opera? Just kidding. Stay tuned and let me know what you think of their efforts and where BMC can learn some lessons.