MSDNDevelopment Posts
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Kent Sharkey's been a busy guy
Wednesday, April 04, 2007Kent's blog is back online and in one of his recent posts he updates us on all the projects he's been working since he left Microsoft (where we were both working at MSDN as content strategists)... tons of cool stuff, definitely worth reading through and following some links. Wednesday, April 04, 2007 # What has been occupying my time It's been about a nice round 17 months (give or take) since I left Microsoft. Since then, Microsoft shipped some software, people have argued, and the world continues its revolution, rotation and other movements.I know all of you were wondering, "What's [read more...]Filed under | 0 comments »Share this -
Pageviews are Obsolete
Monday, September 11, 2006For quite some time I've thought Pageviews were a mostly useless number to be tracking for any web site. This was very clear at MSDN, where such stats are tracked very carefully... spreadsheets are created... charts are made... and yet, none of us really believed in the Pageview #s. Instead we used to focus more on unique visitors or an odd calculated value we called unique page views (not everyone's definition of that # is the same, but suffice it to say that is an attempt to more accurately represent real site visits by real people). RSS is one reason [read more...]Share this -
Beta versions of the MSDN home page now available...
Wednesday, December 14, 2005I've been working (as part of a large team!) on the new platform for MSDN, which is up and running at http://msdn2.microsoft.com... and now you can see prototype versions of the MSDN home page ontop of that same platform. Check it out here [http://beta.msdn.microsoft.com/default.aspx]. The new home page demonstrates some of the personalization/profile features that will end up on the final MSDN site in the near future. [read more...]Filed under | 5 comments »Share this -
application/rss+xml vs. text/xml
Monday, December 12, 2005I've been working on some feed support in MSDN's new online platform (a beta of which is running http://msdn2.microsoft.com) and I had to decide what content-type to use when outputting a RSS feed. I knew this was a contentious issue in the past, but I thought it might have been resolved so I did some browsing of specs and discussions and ended up with the following links: A discussion on Sam Ruby's blog around content-type (the comments are the interesting part) This post by Dave Winer I'm sure I could find more, but it appears this was never really resolved... [read more...]Filed under | 11 comments »Share this -
Just spent way too much time fixing VB code coloring on MSDN2
Tuesday, November 15, 2005You may have already noticed this, but the current build of MSDN2 has a bug in the way it colors VB code snippets, as you can see here (scroll down, there are quite a few problems in the code snippet coloring, see how many you can spot!)... turns out the code wasn't handling comments right, text in quotes, and it didn't have a full list of the VB keywords (so MsgBox was not recognized, for example). I've fixed it all up now (I think) so that code will work its way through review and test then get added to some [read more...]Filed under | 3 comments »Share this -
Gave a talk earlier today about how we built MSDN2...
Thursday, November 10, 2005I focused mainly on the Virtual Path Provider in ASP.NET 2.0, and how we use that to construct our pages on the new MSDN platform (visible live at http://msdn2.microsoft.com). I thought I should put up some links to additional information, starting with a link to the reference material currently available on the Virtual Path Provider. VirtualPathProvider Class (System.Web.Hosting) [read more...]Share this -
Just arrived for ASP.NET Connections...
Monday, November 07, 2005Landed in Vegas for the conference, talk is on Thursday.... I'll be talking about MSDN2.microsoft.com, but more specifically I'll be covering the use of the Virtual Page Provider feature in ASP.NET 2.0, so if that type of thing appeals to you, come by and check it out! [read more...]Filed under | 0 comments »Share this -
RSS feed authoring for those without blog software or an enjoyment of typing angle brackets
Tuesday, November 01, 2005Blogs and blogging software seem to be everywhere these days, and RSS has been a top buzzword for quite some time, everyone and their dog wants to take advantage of this new trend and technology. The problem is, it isn't a simple process to create and maintain a valid RSS file. If you aren't willing to run a complete blogging system or if you aren't capable of hand-editing XML, then you don't have a lot of options. For most of the folks that will read this blog entry, you probably don't have this problem, producing RSS 2.0 wouldn't be much [read more...]Share this -
After some discussions with Sam Ruby and others on the FeedValidator mailing list, the MSDN RSS feed validates as is...
Tuesday, September 27, 2005In an earlier post, I discussed the fact that the MSDN feeds were failing to validate due to a MIME type that included parameters (charset in this case, like 'text/html ;charset=utf-8'), but I also posted a query about this issue into the listserv for FeedValidator.org. Sam mentioned it on his blog, and then went ahead and updated the validator to recognize a MIME type with parameter as valid. In the meantime, I updated the MSDN generator to strip out the parameters :), but I still think they are technically valid so I'm glad the feed validates as it is today [read more...]Filed under | 0 comments »Share this -
A bug in my RSS generator, but is it really invalid?
Monday, September 26, 2005The RSS generator for MSDN, creator of this feed, and many more ... has a small problem. Way upstream, when various people inside the company enter information about an upcoming headline, they have the ability to specify a URL to a download. The intent was for this to be a URL to an actual downloadable file, so when I generate an RSS item from that headline entry, I take that URL and turn it into an enclosure entry in the RSS file. <item> <title>Read about Atlas - Ajax for ASP.NET</title> <description>ASP.NET "Atlas" is a package of new Web development technologies [read more...]Filed under | 2 comments »Share this
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