Welcome to the See Also Blog

What is the inspiration for the title?

The template structure of MSDN reference articles that writers use for Methods is:

  Syntax

  Parameters

  Remarks

  Requirements 

  See Also 

Other common templates are:

  Syntax

  Members

  Remarks

  Requirements

  See Also 

(used for Structures) 

or

  About

  See Also 

(used for Overview materials) 

Every template that we have ends with See Also.  The See Also section is used to give additional references for more information, to redirect users to related topics, and to refer users to alternative topics that they may have been looking for when they reached this particular topic.

I believe that the rationale for the way content appears on MSDN and the structure of our content and the reasons that we do it the way we do it will be a new theme of my blog adding to the "musings of a programmer/writer" and "cool stuff you can do with software".

When I started out as a programming writer, we worked using MS Word and these templates were effectively Macros that we ran inside of the application. Recent innovations in our publishing tools have enabled us to start with more boilerplate-created templates more easily; but still, every time we start a page that ends up on MSDN, we stare at boilerplate text in our editor that ends in See Also.

Why move here?  

For a number of reasons, I have recently moved my blog from Movable Type back to the MSDN blogging system.  Moving back to MSDN will simplify syndication and will be more consistent with other Microsoft blogs.  I also was having some strange issues with Movable Type and formatting -- ironically, the same issues that drove me there in the first place are pushing me back to MSDN.  At any rate, hopefully this will continue to work.