Paul Krill
Editor at Large

MS sets Community Content feature

news
Dec 8, 20062 mins

Looking to involve developers more in documentation, Microsoft is offering a Community Content feature for Visual Studio 2005 as part of an MSDN Wiki release candidate.

The capability is enabled for Visual Studio and the .Net 3.0 Class Library on MSDN Online, according to a Microsoft blogger.

“The Community Content feature allows our community of developers worldwide to extend the official online documentation by adding tips, notes, code examples, and other information alongside the over 300,000 topics covered by this [release candidate],” S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president in Microsoft’s developer division, said in his blog.

“Because the community content is placed in a Wiki environment, developers can edit existing content blocks and add new ones,” Somasegar said.

The current release is in English, but versions in other languages will be offered in February 2007. These languages include French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Traditional Chinese.

Only some topics in the MSDN Library currently are enabled for Community Content. Others will be added in coming weeks and months.

Key links enabled for Community Content include:

* Statistics.

* RSS feed.

* Visual Studio.

* .Net Framework 2.0 reference.

* .Net Framework 3.0.

Microsoft with MSDN Wiki has two goals: to let the community localize MSDN content to more languages than would otherwise be feasible, and to allow the community to expand the documentation.

Users can put in tags, examples, tips and tricks and other information not covered in the original documentation, according to Microsoft.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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