Visual Communication and Design, Now with Audio!
Good-looking information just works better.
Getting Hired as a Writer at Microsoft
It seems that there are not a lot of writers with programming experience who are looking for a...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 08/15/2006
Providing Marketing Content
Marketing provides the product content that customers read first. This content introduces customers...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 07/31/2006
Graphic Art and Design in Technical Documentation
Graphic artists and designers are an important part of documentation, but until lately I didn't look...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 07/27/2006
Thinking Visually
I want to use more illustrations and other graphics in our documentation. Graphics can help clarify...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 07/21/2006
A Writer's Thoughts about Technical Writing
What is it that programmer writers do? How do they prepare to become programmer writers? I asked...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 07/12/2006
Content Architects - An Interview with Dennis Kennedy
Developer Division User Education has recently created new positions for content architects. These...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 07/07/2006
Tech·Ed 2006 - An Interview with McLean Schofield
One of the writers on my team, McLean Schofield, recently returned from a week at Tech·Ed 2006 in...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 06/26/2006
MSDN Wiki - An Interview with Molly Bostic
There has been a lot of discussion on the Web since the announcement of the MSDN Wiki. I talked with...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 06/21/2006
Tokens
Tokens are markers that we can use in the documentation to represent product and feature names that...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 06/19/2006
Review Day
It was review day for writers and editors, so we spent some time writing up our accomplishments for...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 06/15/2006
Author's Voice
In this short podcast I talk about how I try to preserve the author's voice while still making it...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 06/12/2006
Interview with Sean Maguire, UE Localization PM
Sean makes sure that all documentation from the developer division is translated, and in some cases...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 04/13/2006
Trimming
One of the things I've noticed lately is how much I've been trimming out extra words. Sometimes...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 01/27/2006
Workflow and Copyediting Time
It's copyediting time for me. On my team, that means a lot of topics are all now ready for me to do...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 12/15/2005
Style Guides
The Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications is our house style guide, of course. It...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 11/22/2005
Planning for the Next Version
We have had a couple of offsite meetings in the past two weeks to prepare for the next version of...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 11/10/2005
Interview with Eli Murray, Programmer/Writer for Visual Studio Help and Search
Eli is a programmer/writer on the Visual Studio core IDE team. One of the features she writes about...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 10/24/2005
Interview with Tonda Kiffin, Content Discoverability Editor
Tonda is the content discoverability editor for Visual Studio 2005. We talked about what a...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 10/14/2005
How to: Increase Discoverability (Follow Up)
We decided to call the new topics "walkthroughs," and give them titles that describe the end-to-end...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 10/11/2005
How to: Increase Discoverability of New Topics?
My team is discussing how we can make some new topics discoverable, so that the target readers can...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 10/05/2005
New Users
I just watched two usability study participants use our tools (Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 09/21/2005
Structured Content and Content Reuse
I just finished a two-day training class on managing structured content. The main ideas in the class...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 09/16/2005
Interview with Paul Cornell, Documentation Manager at Microsoft
I interviewed Paul Cornell, a documentation manager for the Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 08/30/2005
Content Publishing Class: Part Four
I finished the last content quality class of the series. This session was less formal than the...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 08/25/2005
Focusing on Developmental Editing
In the developer division, all technical editors are primarily "developmental editors." Our main...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 08/17/2005
Content Publishing Class: Part Three
This week we started off by talking about how to make Help accessible to people with disabilities....
Author: HarryMiller Date: 08/10/2005
Comparisons Aren't Always Easy
An interesting post on The Old New Thing blog. He points out that it's not easy to use comparisons...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 08/09/2005
Interview with Jo Molnar, Technical Editor at Microsoft
I interviewed Jo Molnar, a technical editor on the SDK team here at Microsoft. We talked about his...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 08/04/2005
Content Publishing Class: Part Two
I attended part two of the content quality class today. We talked about globalization, localization,...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 08/03/2005
Content Publishing Class: Part One
I attended part one of a four-part class on content quality today. Each class is four hours long....
Author: HarryMiller Date: 07/27/2005
Context in Topics
The documentation team I'm on is starting to write topics for a new product. It's a fairly small...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 07/22/2005
Voice in Technical Writing
The next version of Windows has the code name Longhorn. That's not really a secret; you can read...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 07/20/2005
Thoughts from Other Microsoft Editors
A couple other technical editors here at Microsoft have recently posted their thoughts. Mike Pope:...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 07/15/2005
Highlighting Action
When I was doing mostly writing, the usability engineer for my team told me to write all topics in...
Author: HarryMiller Date: 07/14/2005