Note: This post is number Four in a series of posts about Microsoft’s MSDN.  Take a look at some of the other posts in this series and learn even more about the MSDN web site giant designed by developers for developers.

MSDN Developer Centers

The primary purpose of the MSDN web site is to provide developers with up to date information on how to develop applications for the Microsoft platforms.  If your even a slight bit familiar with developing applications, you already know that there are about as many ways to develop applications for Microsoft platforms as there are Microsoft Millionaires (ok, probably not that many, but there are a lot).  There is Windows, Web, Office, Server and Database development.  You also have the Windows client and mobile tools and the ASP.Net or Silverlight platforms.  And you can’t forget the .Net platform and it’s numerous languages and API’s.  It’s enough to make your head spin thinking about it.  So, what is a developer to do?  How do new Developers get started?  Where do experts go to get up to date information?  I think the answer lies in the “Developer Center” section of the MSDN web site. 

Developer Centers is an approach that Microsoft has taken to help seasoned and new developers find up-to-date and relevant MSDN information based on their particular development bent or preference.  Think of it as a way of slicing up the information found on MSDN into different views or angles, giving the user access to…

“ …content and resources around specific products and technologies. They connect you to code samples, community sites, technical articles and documentation, upcoming events, and much more.”

Most of the commonly used Developer Centers can be found through links directly on the MSDN home page.  They've broken then down into sections to help you find the right center for your needs.  There are sections for Developer Tools and Languages (VB, C++, C#, etc),  Windows and Web development, even sections for just Architecture or Data.

When exploring these sections don’t just limit yourself to one, but think about all of the areas that you might develop for and use several of them to broaden your knowledge.  You might even use one of them to expand your skills into a new language or technology.  In my opinion the developer centers really help reduce a lot of the noise you could encounter when trying to navigate all of the information found on a site like MSDN.  You should also make sure you look at all of the Develop Centers, because that list on the main page, is only a small shadow of the many centers available. 

Free Developer Software

Ok enough lettuce talk on the developer centers, let’s get into the meat of the sandwich and explore one of the centers that new developers should be aware of The Express Editions (note in Microsoft speak “Express Edition” means the free limited featured versions)  WAIT!!!!!  don’t tune me out yet just because you saw the words “Limited” and “Feature” in the same sentence. These free products are not your fathers type of free.  There is a ton of functionality packed into them and you can do amazing things for relatively free. 

This developer center is different than most and is a complete web site on it’s own.  From here you can explore the express editions by interest or by product.  Are you a Web, Windows, Game, or Hardware developer?  Do you want to develop using Visual Basic, C#, C++?  Not sure where to start?  Try the “Explore by Interest –> Windows” and start learning how to develop applications for Vista or Windows 7.  Use this area to help yourself focus on what type of development you would like to pursue.  Depending on what type of development you prefer they will direct you to a set of Express Edition software and tools to help you.  Then move toward the “Explore by Product” section of the web site and learn about the different editions of Visual Studio. 

Finally “Get the Software” by downloading and installing one of the versions of the Express Editions and use the Samples and Resources to give yourself a quick start or Coding4Fun section to find some cool, fun things to write applications for.  Wow, There’s a lot out there.  I’ll make it a point to write another post on this with more detail.

We’ll I’ve probably wasted another several minutes of your time that will never be recovered.  Hopefully you have learned something new and are now better equipped to work and solve problems through simple interactions with the MSDN.  Till next time, enjoy the day!

TTYL!

We’ve been here before haven’t we.  The MSDN top navigation bar part two.    This time we’ll explore the last three links.

Looking for answers to questions?  Need to search the extensive knowledgebase?  Want to just vent a little about that annoying bug “undocumented feature”? Then this is the place to start.  There are three main areas of this MSDN section.  Searching the knowledge base, Searching the forums, or Contacting Microsoft for additional help.   Each section is well laid out and doesn’t need much explaining.  One thing not so obvious is the bottom right corner of this page.  Make sure you scroll down to see this.  Down here, you’ll see some additional and useful links.  The first link takes you to the Microsoft Connect site, which is a way to directly connect with the developers of your favorite Microsoft product.  It’s a User to Developer connection site where you can voice your concern or point out a bug.  It’s also a great place to get and download the pre-beta and beta releases of common or new Microsoft tools.  Just below the Microsoft Connect block, you’ll see some other quick support links.  I especially like the HotFixes link which will take you to the MSDN Code Gallery (more on this later) and filters it to show all of the latest hot fixes published by Microsoft.  Filtering this list by tags is quite useful for finding product specific hot fixes and the supporting KB article(s).

I’ve been told that we all desire to fit in wherever we go.  I’ve heard that this is our inborn sense of community.  We’ll it looks like Microsoft’s MSDN web site designers have taken that into account and added this section.  Of all the sections we’ve explored, this one is probably the one least traveled.  I didn’t see much on this page, outside of the cool Silverlight control scrolling through the latest Microsoft Friendly blog posts (hmm. wonder why mine isn’t listed?).  I’ll leave the rest of the page for you to explore.  Don’t worry it won’t take you long.

Ahh.  The forums.  The place where MVP’s hang out.  Nothing new or extremely exciting here.  If you’ve used any other sites “forum” this one will look quite familiar.  My first reaction however, was that this page was way to big, how could anyone find the right forum to use.  It would be like climbing Mt Kilimanjaro (very cool site btw and some great environmental activism sponsored in part by my employer HP), to fully navigate this page.   Luckily they have given you some tools to make it a little easier to climb.  I would make sure you use the Collapse All button to bring the page into a more user friendly start.  Then  expand just the product sections that you are looking to use the forums for.  Also, make sure you become familiar with the “search” box at the top and the “Browse by Tag” sections  With over 3.8 million posts and just under One Million threads you’ll need something to help you navigate this colossal repository of dialogs and unanswered questions.

We’ll I’ve probably wasted another several minutes of your time that will never be recovered.  Hopefully you have learned something new and are now better equipped to work and solve problems through simple interactions with the MSDN.  Till next time, enjoy the day!

TTYL!

There it is.  That’s it.  The MSDN top navigation bar.  While it looks simple, the places it’ll take you are amazing (sounds like an advertisement for an airline).  Pretty boring by itself, but important to understanding the breakdown of the content available on MSDN.   Week two of The Weekly MSDN finds us exploring the places you can get to from the top navigation bar.  Today I’ll try and show you some snippets of each of these sections and give a brief overview/review of them, but I would encourage you to take a tour through them yourself.  When you do, make sure you look for something that will make you say “Wow, I didn’t know that”.   

Let’s start with Home.  The main landing page.  From here you can get to the Developer Centers, great for those wanting to dive into a specific technology and learn more or see what’s new.  This is one area where Microsoft excels.  Regardless of your language/tool they have content for you.  If your VB, C# or SQL Server (Hmm, where is the Azure Developer Center?) they have content for you and passionate evangelists to show you things along the way. One area on the main page to check out is the “Networkwide” section which has a very “Google” feel to it (possibly a little better organized).  From here you can explore other areas of developer interest, like Channel 9, CodePlex, or MSDN Magazine.  All great places to learn more.

The next logical place to go on the navbar is the “Library”.  Wow this one is huge and I’m not sure I’m ready to go here yet.  I’ll have to come back, since this is one key area for all developers to get familiar with.  This section is the heart of Microsoft information for developers.  It’s the source for all things API.  If there is a function you need to details on you’ll find it here.  If you want to use technology like ClickOnce in your .Net app you find the details here.  This is the source for all things on White Paper, API documentation, class details, method signatures, code samples and way more, information my brain is not large enough to hold.  If you’re a developer you’re already familiar with this area.  Therefore, it will be my goal to find some unknown nuggets of information in here to highlight for you as we explore the MSDN.

Want to find a how-to video or some beginner training? Click here.  Need to transition your knowledge from PHP or Java to .Net?  Start here.    Want to learn what’s new in Visual Studio 2010? This is it.  There are hundreds (if not thousands) of quick 10-15 minute videos on almost every Microsoft development topic imaginable.  They have material on MSDN Certifications, A full Learning catalog of courses including learning plans to help you advance your career or become certified.  The areas of this MSDN section that stand out to me are the “How Do I” videos and the learning manager.  With the “How Do I” video series you can quickly learn through short Silverlight videos.  For those visual and auditory learners out there is nothing better than a short video on a topic of interest.  I would encourage you to take a few minutes each week to explore a new video and see how much you can learn.  If your serious about learning and like to take formal courses  or track your progress, then take a look at the Learning Manager and the My Learning section.  Register and setup a learning plan which will customize the courses you’ll need to meet your goals.  For those perpetual learners out there (that are Microsoft Techies at heart) you’ll love this place (especially if your employer is buying).

Knowing how I think and research sites, I should’ve listed this one first.  Almost every site I explore with the intent of finding their download page.  Most of the time I’m looking for a freebie or some cool new tool, but sometimes I’m actually use their download manager to keep track software I’ve purchased or to download an available update.  Microsoft's download center is no different.  From here you’ll find many different types of downloads, beta software, trial downloads, service packs and more.  You can see what the popular downloads are (although 99.999% of the time it’s the .Net 2.0 Framework Redistributable Runtime, so I’m not sure the value of that section).  I specifically like the breakdown of downloads by product or technology.  It allows you to quickly filter a huge list of downloads to just the area you need.  If your an MSDN Subscriber, you’ll be frequenting this area a lot to get the downloads that your subscription provides.

Well that’s four out of the seven sections and I’ve run out of time.  I’ll be back next week with the rest (Support, Community and Forums).  Till then head to the store, buy some gourmet coffee and grab some flavored syrup to go with it.  I’ll be back with part two of the MSDN Navigation Bar.

TTYL!

So let’s start the journey to understand the MSDN simply with a review of their MSDN Flash newsletter.  A good way to keep up on the ever changing content of the MSDN is to subscribe to the MSDN Flash Newsletter.  

Directly from their site…

MSDN Flash delivers critical developer news to you in one information-dense, compact newsletter. Stay up to date with the latest development news from Microsoft by subscribing today. Learn about the latest resources, SDKs, downloads, partner offers, security news, and national and local developer events. Every other week you'll get an e-mail containing pointers to all of the new articles, samples, and headlines from MSDN Online, the MSDN Library, the Knowledge Base, the Developer Centers, and other Microsoft Web sites. In addition, look for announcements of Microsoft and industry events, training opportunities, chats, and webcasts.

It’s a newsletter that conforms to what you want to see, allowing you to add or remove topics of interest to you.  New subscribers are taken through a series of questions that help you mold the newsletter to give you the information you want to see.  If you’re a current subscriber, they recommend reviewing your choices periodically to keep the newsletter current for our ever-changing interests and jobs.

Subscribing will also get you some additional content not available in the ‘online’ version of the newsletter.  Each email edition contains an editorial from one of several regionally chosen guest editors who take turns providing pointers to great MSDN content, free downloads, mash ups, or other fun things.  The editors are usually regional evangelists, which works to your advantage since they are familiar with things in your area and also are people you can see and talk to if you attend their events.

Now for the downsides of the newsletter.  First it’s regionally based and while this is a good thing, sometimes you need to see information from several regions.  It’d be great if you could select several regions or no-region and get everything (I need to try that out, maybe you can).  Second, it’s just a newsletter.   No matter how hard they try they’ll never get everything in there.  MSDN is a huge, very large, lots of content, extremely big (you get the picture) site with a lot of data in it.  It is not humanly (or even machinely - is that a word?) possible to grind all that content down into something you can read over a cup of coffee while chestnuts roast on the fire.  However, it’s a good place to start learning about the MSDN and meet some of the people involved with it.

I am also a little disappointed in the frequency of the newsletters.  With the amount of content on MSDN and the number of evangelists that Microsoft employees you’d think they’d be able to push this out more frequently.  I would enjoy getting this newsletter once a week or more.  Maybe with the improved MSDN site things will be more intuitive.  Only time will tell.

Well that’s all for now.  Thanks for joining me.  I enjoyed the coffee (a chilled German roast over ice with French vanilla and cream).  See you next time.

Enjoy the Weekend!

Have you ever read someone else’s code?  I have, but generally it wasn’t to see how well they coded it, or to learn something new, but rather to fix something broke or add a new feature.  However, since I began reading Scott Hanselman and his “The Weekly Source Code” series of posts, I have changed the way I think and operate, somewhat.  I’ve began looking at code just for the fun of it.  Yea, kind of weird.  But that’s what being in this business is all about (or so I tell myself).  If your not familiar with Scotts series, it’s about taking some time each week to purposely read someone else’s code hoping to learn something, good or bad, that will help you become a better programmer.  With the advent of Open Source projects and Google Code (is there a Bing Code?), that, has become a lot easier.

How about documentation?  Have you ever just grabbed your favorite API documentation or a stack of white papers and sat down by a cozy fire and read it from top to bottom while sipping some a latte? No? Well frankly, neither have I.  But, I constantly find myself digging into them to understand a new tool or looking through them to solve a problem. Sometimes I use them to write my code for me grabbing the “samples” and pasting them in my classes.  However, when I use them it’s usually as a result of a Google or Bing search pointing me to something deep inside of the documentation.  I’ve never really taken them from the surface and just started reading them.  Can you do that?  Is there a way to read documentation like a book?  I don’t know but, I’m willing to experiment to find out and in the process expand my knowledge and hopefully yours too.  So in the spirit of Scotts “The Weekly Source Code” series, I am going to begin a series on reviewing online documentation, specifically Microsoft's. Taking a look at the hard core .Net developers favorite source for documentation, MSDN.  MSDN is chock full of information of all varieties.  There is so much information that I believe a lot of it is overlooked by the average developer, myself included.   I intend to fix that and make myself more aware of what’s in there and, hopefully you’ll come along for the ride.

So join me next Friday as I begin this journey into the the tangled field of API’s, white papers and blog posts.

Till then, get the firewood and cappuccino machine ready.  As for me, I’m off to start mapping my trip.

Enjoy the day!