A Chance to Influence the MSDN Visual Studio Documentation (Help System)

The docs team here at Microsoft has created a new survey to solicit your opinion on the help system found in the MSDN technical library. This the same information you see if you press F1 in Visual Studio to get help on the IDE or your development language. I know the people who create and process this survey, and I can assure that any feedback you give will be processed and carefully considered. The team is strongly driven by input from our users, and this is your chance to have your say. I’ve taken the survey myself, and found that it consists of about 10 pages with an average of 2 or 3 questions per page. I didn’t spend much time contemplating each question, and was therefore able to finish the survey in about 5 minutes.

Links

• The Survey: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=102169
• The MSDN Library
• The MSDN Library page on Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Thank you for your input!

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 27, 2009
  Call me blind, Charlie, but I can't find a survey on the page you link to...

• Anonymous
  October 27, 2009
  The survey link is the same as the "The MSDN Library page on Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2" link...

• Anonymous
  October 27, 2009
  Sorry about the bad link. After you have taken the survey then the original link resolves to the page shown above, which is how I got mixed up.

• Anonymous
  October 28, 2009
  Happens to me all the time. :) Thanks for updating the link!

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2009
  Sorry, I was going to fill out the survey but I accidentally hit F1 and timed out waiting for help to open.

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2009
  The search functionality in Visual Studio 2008 help is buggy. It consistently find gobs of pages that don't even contain the key words I have searched for. I just did a search for Inline Function C#. There is no sutch thing as an inline function in C# but yet it finds 500 results. When I open the top 3 results they all relate to SQL Server and none of them contain my search text "C#". What's up with that??? How is it finding pages that don't even contain my search words. Just for the record Google does not have this problem and produces loads of accurate results for this exact query so I know it can be done. Charlie, Thanks for posting this survey. Maybe this long standing bug will finally get some attention.

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2009
  Here is an extreme example of a buggy search in Visual Studio 2008 Help. I did a search for the following giberish: 394nf3 49fn34f xas89ijn sql lx3zxm4z Google finds nothing for this search because it's total nonsence. However, Visual Studio Help finds 500 matches. There is no way that even 1 of those 500 pages has anything to do with my search. It's like the search results are completely random and have nothing to do with my search words.

• Anonymous
  November 10, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 24, 2009
  Greg I just did the same search and similar searches and came up with 0 results. (VS2008). Maybe you need updates or something?

• Anonymous
  December 11, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 07, 2010
  Please allow me to increase the font size of the Visual Studio help browser / web browser.