Developer News for the Week of Nov 5th, 2010
This week, MSDN updated the search page to make it easier to find your content, we published the final chapter for coding Windows applications with Hilo, and published the Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Application Quality guide to the MSDN library.
MSDN Search Update
MSDN made a major update to their search results presentation page to address some challenges that customers have been having with discovering content. This update changes the way that results are presented when you submit a query and lets you filter through them much faster. The following image really shows how this is happening:
It's great to see the MSDN team making progress in this area! Let's hope the progress continues with getting better results and making search more powerful and useful.
Hilo Updates
This week marks the final update week for Hilo. Chapter 16: Using the Web Services API shows you how You can now see the entire end to end story telling you how you can learn how to develop a Windows app with Hilo. This has been an exciting project to participate in and I'm looking forward to other currently-in-development projects that hopefully can make a similar impact for Windows developers.
Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Quality Guide
The Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Application Quality Guide has been republished to the MSDN library with minor internal updates (we updated some links). This content is great if you are looking to find a checklist of things you can test for to ensure the best experience for Windows users. If you have an application or are developing an application that will be used on Windows, this is in many ways a must read document. Also, we recently updated it to include compatibility tips for targeting Internet Explorer 8 and there are lots of great best practices resources sprinkled around in the documentation. If you want an offline version of the Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Application Quality Cookbook, you can get it on Code Gallery.
Gus's 5-year MSFT Anniversary!
On a more personal note, today marks my 5 year anniversary at Microsoft. It's a Microsoft tradition to bring in a pound of M&Ms for every year you work here and on my first year anniversary, I got a photo of me with my first pound. I was too busy today to get a proper picture of me with what amounts to 5 lbs of M&Ms, but I did get some quick pics with my phone for posterity. Anyways, here's my 1 year anniversary picture from four years back. Have a great weekend!
As always, feel free to comment, email, or try to reach me on twitter if you have anything Microsoft-related (especially developer related) that you would like to ask / tell / talk about.