Duncan Mackenzie.NET

Kent'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. […]

For 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 […]

I'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 [

I'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 so […]

You 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 […]

I 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 […]

Landed 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! […]

Blogs 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 […]

In 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, […]

The 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 downloada […]

I've been messing around with using XSL to display RSS on MSDN, as a simpler alternative to a custom ASP.NET control, and while it works perfectly in the core case (display all the items in a feed in a format), there are two additional requirements that were very easy to handle in a .NET class, but […]

In my last post, I was talking about pulling my articles from MSDN into the chrome of my site. This type of system could be created using a frameset, but frames are evil, so that isn't the approach I […]

Check out my articles page, which is built from an RSS file by the way, and click on any of the "Coding 4 Fun" articles. You'll end up still in my site, […]

Thanks to a post by Nick Parker, I found out my blog site was not producing valid RSS... and now it is :) […]

Just posted recently, there is a opening at MSDN for a "Software Development Engineering Lead". This is within the same group that I have just joined and it looks like a great job for the right person. Here is a brief snippet from the full job description.... Come leverage state-of-the-art techno […]

I have been pondering the best approach for ensuring user supplied HTML is XHTML... and while it actually isn't hard to validate whether or not a given block of HTML is valid XHTML, what I really wanted was something that would fix up some of the more basic errors. Well, MSDN Magazine to the rescue. […]

When we originally added RSS feeds to the various developer centers on MSDN, we included a line (shown below) in the HTML of those pages that let browsers and other software know that there was a RSS feed available that was related to the content of the page. […]

Recently I transitioned the C# Content Strategist role over to Frank Redmond, but that was only the first of several changes for me at MSDN. Today, my boss made the rest of the changes public, so now I can talk about it :) I'm going to be leaving the Content Strategy team completely and joining t […]

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had written a new system for producing MSDN's RSS feeds, and those feeds are now live at the same URLs as the previous versions. You might get some duplicates in your aggregators, (since these are new feeds but with some overlap of items from the old feeds) but […]

... and it is almost ready to ship.... […]