New Refresh of the Internet Explorer Developer Center on MSDN
The MSDN Internet Explorer Developer Center has finally come up to speed!
As part of the Web Platform and Tools Marketing Team, one of the pieces of information we are trying to make sure people know about is all the great new features of IE 7: better security, better CSS standards support, the RSS support, etc. You may be aware that there has been an MSDN Developer Center for IE for sometime, although I doubt it since it has received very little traffic in the past. It was created a long time ago and suffered from not taking advantage of improvements MSDN has made in its design and infrastructure over the years. Well those days are no longer. Besides a two week vacation, I spent most of August revamping the site so that there are now MSDN Forums for IE Development, there is an RSS feed for new content, the information architecture (the table of contents for those of you not used to creating large web sites) is in sync with the standard MSDN IA for developer centers, and the content should be a lot easier to find.
One of the things I had discovered is that there is a lot of great IE7 content in the MSDN library, but that because the IE content team was publishing their own content into the library that it wasn't being entered into the MSDN content database. This means that no headlines were being generated across MSDN and the content wasn't appearing in any of the RSS feeds. We aren't completely finished getting this setup (so some of this is being done by hand and there is still a technical issue where a bunch of the content takes you out of the dev center when you click on an article - and an interim redirect makes it hard to get back to where you were) but I'm optimistic that these issues will be resolved in the next days and weeks and the user experience will be what it should be. We have done some internal education on using the MSDN tools to get the content into the MSDN database, so hopefully the IE content will remain hidden no longer.
Another thing I discovered during this process is that the IE Team Blog rocks! They are constantly posting really good content...and you can find it under Dave Massy's picture on the homepage of the IE Developer Center. :-)
What is the main thing you should take away from the IE dev center? That IE 7 is just around the corner! Get the Release Candidate, make sure your web apps work using the Readiness Toolkit, Check out all the cool Add-ons that extend IE7 and see what tools are available for tracing, rolling out IE, etc. Where do you find all this info? On the IE Developer Center of course.
So check out the new and improved Internet Explorer Developer Center.
-Matt