Building on the new designs that were launched in May, the MSDN team is beginning to release a new round of Dev Center design updates - starting with the Visual Basic Developer Center. Developer Centers are mini-sites on MSDN focused on specific developer tools and technologies. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The new design is focused on three primary objectives:

• Increase discoverability of high-value content
• Offer more RSS feeds
• Integrate new social capabilities

Here are some new things to check out:

• Learn Tab: To help begin the process of finding learning resources, developers are first presented with a list of VB topics. Clicking thru on any topic loads a page of relevant learning resources organized by type (e.g., e-learning, books, classroom, etc.). Although you can't see it on the surface, the team is actually leveraging new social bookmarking and tagging services from our Social Platform to create these views.
• Forums Tab: MSDN Forums are an essential resource for developers to ask questions, find answers, and discuss technical topics. All top Dev Centers will include a tab dedicated to Forums. The Forums page includes links to top forums, featured moderators, tips on using forums, and feeds of the Most Viewed and Most Helpful forums threads.
• Community Tab: The Community tab is where we try to surface all the great people and content coming from the global developer community - including Microsoft people. Couple of new and cool things about this page: Popular MSDN Social Bookmarks Feed displays VB resources bookmarked by the community using MSDN Social Bookmarking and tagged with VB-related tags (anyone can contribute to this new feed by using the "visual basic" tag). The new Buzz section contains similar feeds of online resources tagged with VB-related tags in popular community sites like Delicious, Digg, and Technorati.

In addition to these things, across the whole center, we have tried to generally tighten up the page layout to get more info above fold and use more iconography to enhance discoverability.

Please let us know what you think of the new design by commenting on this blog, or talking with us in the MSDN Site Feedback forum.