Microsoft is Replacing MSDN and TechNet Forums With Microsoft Q&A

Microsoft has been slowly dismantling its MSDN and TechNet blogging platforms for the past year-plus. This week, Microsoft introduced something meant to replace the MSDN and TechNet forums: A preview of Microsoft Q&A. From a report: Microsoft officials said they are making the switch because its MSDN and TechNet forums are outdated, according to a Frequently Asked Questions page about the new Q&A site. The new Q&A experience is part of the larger docs.microsoft.com platform. It is designed to offer "relevant and timely answers to your technical problems from a community of experts and Microsoft engineers." The new service will allow users to follow posts, tags or people to get information; provide suggested answers as users type their questions; and the ability to bookmark content for future reference. Q&A uses the same user authentication as Microsoft Docs and Learn. Experts will earn Reputation Points for answers they provide.

Oh goody

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait to post a problem and have Pajeet the Indian tell me to clear my cache and cookies and run sfc /scannow! Where do I sign up?

Re:Oh goody

[Darinbob]

Yup, reputation points for questions answered is not the same as questions answered correctly. Thus likely to fall into the same swamp of misinformation as stackoverflow.

Re:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Sorry, but I think you're misunderstanding the format. In 2019, Pajeet is going to tell you your question is a duplicate, and you asked it in the wrong forum anyway, and then his friend is going to reply answering an entirely different question, and then a couple more of their friends are going to lock your question so you can't explain that "How do I create a console application in the new version of Visual Studio?" and "Why don't I find a pot of gold if I search at the end of a rainbow?" are actually diff

Re:

[vux984]

I'm pretty sure that there's going to be at least 4 people suggesting that the question is too vague and someone might =gasp= have enough wiggle room to express an opinion so we have to close this RIGHT NOW before any sort of discussion of the pros and cons of different solutions can occur.

And then 3 more people will be arguing about who should get the reputation points, ending in someone appealing to an admin to get the reputation points allocated some other way...

Before the thread question is finally clos

Re: Oh goody

[Rockoon]

What are you trying to do? There is probably a better way, like compiling as a winforms application. Tl;,Dr .. they always want to answer a different question, because they can't answer the one you asked, but they still want credit for answering.

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

Also, just look at how outdated MSDN is! There's (usually) coherent documentation, links to related docs, feedback boxes, well laid out, easy to use, it's all wrong, wrong, wrong. It needs a refresh to use the flat UI, huge amounts of whitespace with stylishly placed blocks of text in hair-thin fonts, dark pastel on a light pastel background, and with all UI elements hidden until you employ complex hand gestures, swipes, and clicks to reveal them. That's what developers are crying out for, so that's what

Re:

[skids]

I love the guys who think they can google stuff better than the person who asked the question and don't understand the subject matter so they post tangential useless bullshit and derail the whole thread.

That's almost as good as having manuals that tell you that the "EntropyDisable" setting "disables entropy".

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[groobly]

This. That is what every response is like on those fora: typically something in the vein of "try rebooting." Or, more commonly, "install the latest drivers." It's not the blind leading the blind -- the blind at least know they have a problem. It's idiots -- Dunning-Kruger sufferers -- thinking they are actually leading the blind.

Like Sharepoint ? Then get some popcorn!

[Seven Spirals]

What could go wrong? It uses a M$ back-end API. It ostensibly runs from Windows Server and is setup to be Internet facing. I mean hey, IIS has such a glorious record of great functionality and security and Sharepoint is just a fabulous product, riiight? *wink*

Re:

[skids]

What you aren't used to people coming in and ripping up sites full of content to replace them with the new and shiny and losing all the content by now? It's only been going on for the last 15 years or more.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

Man, sadly, I'm all too used to it. *frown*

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[KiloByte]

Most of the usable content on MSDN appears to have been written for Win2k or earlier, with mostly complete but exceedingly terse updates, and a sed job bumping the "minimal supported" version to a non-EOLed release of Windows instead of when the functionality actually got introduced. Searching for that documentation is tedious as Microsoft tends to release idiotic new frameworks every ~3 years, and they pop up first in search engines (internal search on MSDN is useless).

As that documentation is vital whene

Re:

[Phil Urich]

Suddenly all those old offline documentation discs start to seem useful again! ;)

Re:

[Rockoon]

MSDN has gotten more and more unusable.

Good luck finding the value of a constant on MSDN. You have to install their SDK for that... oh.. and the SDK isnt for your preferred language... so now you installed gigabytes of shit for a header file you have to translate by hand...

Good luck deciphering even the SIZE of an api parameter or structure member on MSDN. Its 5 levels of horrendous type warts (that seem to constantly be in flux) these days....

I know I know... "they didnt want you hardcoding constant

this is hugely important to me

[pyrrho]

NOT! *nix forever bitches!

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

"Experience"

[Knuckles]

Jesus, Microsoft, stop with this "Experience" shit. EVERYTHING is now a fucking experience with you. Customer Immersion Experience [microsoft.com]. Retail Demo Experience [microsoft.com]. Local Experience Packs [microsoft.com] (um, it's languages), and my all-time favorite, The Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit [microsoft.com], because mitigating your shit is such a fantastic experience.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What's wrong with MSDN forums?

[jonwil]

I use them all the time and I don't see why they need to go away or be replaced with something crappier. They are easy to use and follow (and easy to ask questions on as well)

Re:What's wrong with MSDN forums?

[Areyoukiddingme]

What's wrong with MSDN forums?
I use them all the time and I don't see why they need to go away or be replaced with something crappier. They are easy to use and follow (and easy to ask questions on as well)

They contain answers to questions about Windows 7. Microsoft has been trying to get Windows 7 to die for the last couple of years, far in advance of their alleged end of life date. This is the continuation of that effort. They're setting fire to every Windows reference that isn't for Windows 10. See that bit about how they're "outdated"? That's code for "makes previous products too viable to use so it must be eradicated."

Re:

[Retired ICS]

"alleged end of life date"

That is the Start of Stability date. Also known as the End of FuckAbout date. It is the date at which a product from Microsoft commences the "as it works today, so will it work tomorrow" period, where something will not just break because of the latest Microsoft boondogle fandangery.

Oh great

[Phil Urich]

And I imagine that like all such Microsoft website moves somehow all the old links will redirect to generic pages.

Oh great -- more broken links

[UnknownSoldier]

Half of the problem is broken links because some dumb-ass decided to move, or worse, delete, the page. STOP FUCKING MOVING pages.

The other half of the problem is the MS drones don't actually READ the fucking question. STOP PARROTING SCRIPT answers.

But what do I know. I'm just another dog on the internet.

Re:

[dwywit]

Yeah. Don't go to answers.microsoft.com if you're hoping to find an actual answer.

The drones trying to earn "points" are desperate to get the first response and a tick in the "answer" box, so they'll not actually bother reading and understanding the question, but cut-and-paste from the standard troubleshooting guide.

The number of times I've seen those idiots tell the OP to try A, B, and C, when it's clearly stated that those have already been done........

Frequently the solution comes from someone else who h

Re:

[weilawei]

The drones trying to earn "points" are desperate to get the first response and a tick in the "answer" box, so they'll not actually bother reading and understanding the question, but cut-and-paste from the standard [...]

So, what you're saying is that they stole Slashdot's innovative frist psot culture?

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[grep -v '.*' *]

MS drones don't actually READ the fucking question. STOP PARROTING SCRIPT answers.

I'm terribly sorry you've encountered this problem. Have you tried turning it off and on again? If not, the problem may be bad RAM or a corrupted file. Have you tried installing the application again?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Great...

[Seng]

The "community experts" they have right now can only parrot the KB articles - for issues unrelated to what the topic is. They going to continue this trend of not having relevant answers on abandoned questions?