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05 September 2008

New Social Features Integrated into Redesigned MSDN Dev Centers

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. 

New VB Dev Center

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The new design is focused on three primary objectives:

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.

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# New Social Features Integrated into Redesigned MSDN Dev Centers said:

PingBack from http://techtoday.110mb.com/2008/09/05/new-social-features-integrated-into-redesigned-msdn-dev-centers/

05 September 08 at 10:29 AM
# Beth Massi - Sharing the goodness that is VB said:

In the past month or so we've been working hard to redesign some parts of the Visual Basic Developer

05 September 08 at 1:11 PM
# The Visual Basic Team said:

Have you refreshed your VB Dev Center page today? If you did, you'll notice a new look on both the Home

05 September 08 at 6:12 PM
# No1 Microsoft Fan said:

Have you refreshed your VB Dev Center page today? If you did, you'll notice a new look on both the Home

05 September 08 at 8:45 PM
# David Jacobson said:

Will each forum require a user a register a unique ID and password for that particular forum?  I have been very disappointed by a widespread failure of a variety of MSDN and other Microsoft forums and blogs to use LiveId.  I personally will not make comments on any Microsoft forum or blog that cannot manage to reuse my LiveId

06 September 08 at 7:46 PM
# Chris.blog.Microsoft said:

We're pleased to announce the availability of our V1 release of MSDN Social , TechNet Social , and Expression

10 September 08 at 1:18 AM
# TrackBack said:
16 September 08 at 4:20 PM
# TrackBack said:
16 September 08 at 4:20 PM
# TrackBack said:
16 September 08 at 4:20 PM
# TrackBack said:
16 September 08 at 4:20 PM
# John Martin said:

@David Jacobson: Good question. All the MSDN and TechNet forums can be logged into using your Live ID. There are other forums sites, however, from other Microsoft teams, that may not use Live ID. But its the standard on all the sites and apps my group runs.

16 September 08 at 11:51 PM
# VB Feeds said:

In the past month or so we've been working hard to redesign some parts of the Visual Basic Developer

21 October 08 at 2:59 AM

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About John Martin

Director & Lead Evangelist, Microsoft Server & Tools Online - the group that manages the global MSDN, TechNet, Expression, and CodePlex sites.
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