Tools and technologies

A question a few of my friends have asked me is - what does building the homepages mean, and do I develop content that is put on the homepages?

The engineering team does not create or update the content on the sites. Instead, the content and the layout of content on the homepage is managed by a team of site planners, site editors who actually update the content on the pages, and partners who supply content feeds.

What I (development team) work on is developing the tools and technologies that enable the editors to show content on the pages the way they want it to look. We utilize an indigenously developed high performance publishing system that provides a platform for the web properties like homepages to build on top of. At a high level, some of the technologies we use are – web standards like XHTML, XML/XSLT, Javascript, CSS, ASP.NET/C#, ASP.NET web services among others as well as rich + interactive technologies like AJAX techniques and Silverlight.

Also, due to the scale and nature of traffic that MSN sites attract - caching, performance and security are a top priority in the design and development of homepage. More on how we go about these in later posts.