Stefan Bodewig's Weblog

Junfeng Zhang points to a beta of an overhaul of MSDN.

I've been accessing the .NET class library docs at MSDN quite a bit over the past weeks and always thought it was rather hard to navigate - in particular when compared to the Javadocs I was used to. I later realized that many of my usability problems with MSDN go away when I use IE since MSDN's navigation frame works a lot better there. But I rather don't want to switch machines between coding on Linux/Mono and reading docs.

First impressions of the new site:

• I can now go to the docs of the String class via http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/System.String and even to String's Length property via http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/System.String.Length. This is a lot better than anything that has been there before. It doesn't work for http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/System.String.Equals, though, but let's remember this is a beta.
  
  http://www.javadocs.org/string#length() is even more concise, but it took many years to finally get there.
• The text is finally readable in Mozilla and friends, although the code snippets and the navigation are still a point or two to small. In the "old MSDN" the first thing I did was hitting CTRL-+ to increase the font size.
• I still have to click on "Foo Members" to see the methods offered by Foo - one more click than I need in Javadoc.
• One single frame and no JavaScript magic to synchronize a bigger frameset, yay!

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