Time for some Longhorn DevCenter Feedback

It's been about 5 months since the Longhorn Developer Center was launched and I'm curious what you guys think of it. Do you like it? What about it don't you like? How could it support your current Longhorn development goals better? What can I do for the budding Longhorn developers that we're not doing? Don't be shy; call it like you see it.

I sometimes find it a little difficult to locate "things."

For example, I wanted to show Kori the medical concept app video a couple nights ago, and I didn't see a link to it anywhere on the longhorn dev center landing page - I also didn't see any obvious way to get to it.

With nowhere left to turn, I just googled for it and found it very quickly. However, it would have been nice to have been able to locate it quickly and easily from the landing page.

None of the links on the sidebar looked like candidates that might lead me to the video, either.

Then, in the past, I've gotten a little frustrated while trying to find longhorn articles. Like Dino's tile article, for example - when I finally had time to read it, it had vanished from the longhorn dev center front page, so I thought it'd be a couple clicks away. It wasn't, though - at least nothing obvious popped up. I wound up going to the msdn library and making a wild guess about where it would be. Fortunately, I was right, but Windows Development -> Windows Code-Named "Longhorn" -> Technical Articles wasn't a very convenient way to find the article, and it certainly isn't in "stumble upon" territory - the only reason I found it is that I was looking for it, which doesn't help people who are just browsing for info.

The flipside of all this, of course, is that the landing page is *very* clean, and I can appreciate that (not kidding - I like sites to be clean and free of distraction).

Maybe just some more linkage in the sidebar that will get me to articles/videos/info more easily... It sometimes feels like there's more than one dev center, and I have to know where to look for the information I want, when what I'd really like is to be able to just hit msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn.

All complaints aside, I find that the dev center works well for me *most* of the time - but you asked if anything wasn't going so well, and I'm a concerned guy, so I thought I'd chime in...

I would like to see some small sample applications that utilize all the concepts used in Longhorn. This will give a clear idea what Longhorn can do and what is the goal of Microsoft in developing Longhorn. Instead of focusing only on animation and graphics, some custom applications that are used in real life can be developed and posted on the Dev Center. I would like to see the applications that were used in the Healthcare sector.

Thanks both of you for that feedback. It helps me make decisions about the future fo the site. Keep it coming! Anyone else?

It would be nice to have foreign (from MS' perspective) added to the community menu. For example, there are a bunch of good articles by Rob Relyea and Nathan Dunlap over at longhornblogs that I'd like to be able to get to quickly after they go off of the main page (and I forget who wrote them!). Secondly, from a layout POV, moving the right menu (page options, essential info, support)to the left would look cleaner, in my opinion. This would give the majority of the space to content. Third, and this would be really cool (and probably an annoying task to accomplish), would be smart tags articles in the dev center, so you could click on a class/property/method mentioned in articles, and be taken to the appropriate docs at http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com

I suspect that the vast majority of the development community is still unable to get their hands on a copy of longhorn. It doesn't matter how good the longhorn developer center is, if we are unable to develop with longhorn.

Here's Andy Kenney's feedback:

http://www.longhornblogs.com/akinney/archive/2004/02/25/2599.aspx

Summarizing a bit, here's what I've heard you guys say so far:

navigation:
-hard to find stuff
-sidebar doesn't seem helpful
-permanent list of interesting external articles, e.g. RobR's stuff from editor's blog
-not all headlines making it onto content pages
-home page very clean (and that's a good thing)
-works well most of the time
-add academic longhorn site to 3rd party sites (http://www.academiclonghorn.com/)

content:
-want small apps that show cross-pillar concepts
-LH timeline
-links from articles into LHSDK
-good overview of new features in LH
-LH Readiness Kit for User Groups

overview:
-can't get copy of LH, so LHDC isn't useful

This is all very useful. Thanks! Got any more?

5 Months?! We've only been up for 4 months! :-)

This is terrific feeedback, as we are continually looking to improve. Keep it coming!

On Content, the msdntv on winfs shows a updated version of the schema in visio format. and says it would be available shortly but hasn't shown up anywhere. would be nice to delve into it.

With the openness shown with Longhorn, it would be nice to see periodically updates to Longhorn SDK documentation with the updates in milestone as a roadmap of the thoughts in LH.

Any chance of finding out what castle is and the programming enviroment that it will present??

Personally, I'd like to see a Longhorn-specific Columns quick pick box on the right (not quite sure on terminology) of the main Longhorn Dev Center page, a la "Page Options", "Essential Information" and "Support".

I entered some comments on some things that desparately need more documentation (both in Longhorn and the current docs).
Namely, the SymbolProvider API which has no sample code whatsoever and has major usability issues.

See the google groups posting below and the reply for an idea. I was so mad I wrote a blog entry about it. Link also below.


http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&newwindow=1&safe=off&threadm=uvG7AY48DHA.2404%40TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dmicrosoft.public.dotnet.framework.clr%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26hl%3Den


http://www.rootkit.com/blog.php?user=syke

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