
So Long, MSDN Blog - nikbackm
https://ericlippert.com/2019/03/21/so-long-msdn-blog/
======
MrRadar
In addition to this, on the blogs that were migrated to the new platform (such
as Raymond Chen's Old New Thing) all of the comments have been purged. That's
extremely unfortunate because those comments had a lot of useful technical
commentary on the blog posts.

~~~
ericlippert
That's terrible. Those comments were alternately hilarious and informative.

~~~
hyperdimension
Well, except for Yuhong Bao most of the time... (:

Oh, and we can't forget xpclient wanting his old Explorer search style back.

------
AndrewStephens
The is highly unfortunate and a bone-headed move by Microsoft. But it does
highlight two points that often get missed now that we rely on the web.

1 - If you don't host your own content then you have no control over it.
Microsoft deleted all their blogs. YouTube and Facebook will one day cease to
exist. This comment and all of yours will disappear once news.ycombinator.com
is defunct. If you want something to last, host it yourself or be prepared to
recreate it somewhere else every few years.

2 - Once you publish something at a URL you control (see point 1), you have a
responsibility to keep it available at the same URL. Nobody is going to hold
you to it but you will break 3rd party sites that link to you. Microsoft
really dropped the ball here.

~~~
pjmlp
Today I can enjoy reading several thousand years old books like Herodotus
travels.

Within the same distance into the future, most of today's knowledge will be
gone.

~~~
DKnoll
I doubt you're ready the original manuscript though. You're reading copies of
copies, there is no reason why content on the Internet will not continue to be
copied in the same way.

~~~
mark-r
It's a matter of scale. You can only make a copy of the whole internet by
committing to that purpose, and there's only one outfit that does it in a
public manner. I can't imagine what it would take to duplicate that database
right now, and it increases every day.

~~~
int_19h
They already have one official mirror.

[http://web.archive.bibalex.org/web/](http://web.archive.bibalex.org/web/)

------
kabdib
One favorite trick of Microsoft IT is to delete old instances of SharePoint
servers for projects. Where "old" is maybe 3-4 years.

Goodbye design documents. Goodbye test plans. Goodbye user studies. Goodbye
meeting notes. Goodbye just about everything interesting except for the source
code of the project. And _backups_? "What is this word you are using . . .
''backup''?"

Which is why I just checked _everything_ into source control and told the PMs
they could bloody well learn how to use Source Depot.

~~~
koolba
Text files for specs and feature lists combined with a proper git blame/log
make for fun time during multi-year project reviews.

~~~
opportune
lol I can see why a PM would be averse to that. Can you imagine if time
estimates on the work item basis had an audit log?

------
chris_wot
Comment he leaves in the post:

 _But at the time I left Microsoft, I was told that .NET management no longer
considered my blog a valuable asset, and that I should stop working on it on
company time, and that they had “community PMs” who would be owning the
relationship with the programming community._

 _Around that time I was also told, funnily enough, that I should never
mention Windows on my blog, because the Windows marketing team wanted to own
all communications with developers about writing software for Windows._

 _I really enjoyed my time at Microsoft; the people I left behind were
amazing, and I miss working with them. And none of the above is high on the
list of reasons why I left Microsoft. But middle management was_ _weird_ _,
man,_ _weird_ _._

~~~
nsoonhui
I can't see this comment in any of the post; care to give a link reference?

Doing a google search on the above comment leads to this HN comment...

~~~
chris_wot
[https://ericlippert.com/2019/03/21/so-long-msdn-
blog/#commen...](https://ericlippert.com/2019/03/21/so-long-msdn-
blog/#comment-94836)

------
jakub_g
There's been a lot of MS content I've noticed disappearing lately. A lot of
resources related to Internet Explorer for example (the Microsoft Connect bug
tracker, and some MSDN blogs). Yeah IE is (almost) dead by now, but there has
been a lot of useful technical knowledge there.

BTW. Today is a great day to donate to the Web Archive:

[https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

------
mark-r
Microsoft has for years shown very little regard for keeping links valid.
Bookmarks to anything they host are almost worthless, they rot so quickly.

~~~
roxil
The bookmarks to dead links are still useful to have any chance of finding the
content on the Internet Archive.

------
ChrisArchitect
just posted:

"UPDATE: The (awesome) Scott Hanselman informs me that there has been a
“hiccup” during migration, and that the intention was to archive the MSDN
blogs in a read-only format with the same links; they should be back soon."

~~~
ericlippert
Indeed, Scott has been thoroughly awesome today. :-)

------
ableal
_" As far as the business goes, I make a lot more in royalties on my beginner
C# videos that O’Reilly distributes than I do on all my book royalties and
editing fees."_

(E.L., in the comment section apropos wishes for a book)

~~~
ericlippert
By a huge margin! And putting together that beginner course only took me a
couple of months working in my spare time, and recording it only took a couple
of days in O'Reilly's studio.

I still edit my friend's programming books, but I sure don't do it for the
money.

~~~
avip
Hi Eric, Thanks for all the hard work you did (and doing) putting high-quality
technical content on the web. I always consult your blog (or, in all laziness,
your SO repertoire) first when in doubt with C#. You're hands down the best
explainer of cs-things ever.

~~~
ericlippert
Thank you, that's a kind thing to say. I find that if I cannot explain a topic
clearly to someone else, I probably don't understand it very well myself. :-)

------
hiei
Never trust another company to handle your data. Look at what happened to
MySpace or any other defunct social network.

------
ericlippert
And it's back. Thanks to Scott and Dan and all their colleagues for their
prompt attention to this matter.

------
danielfeMSFT
Reposting this comment from Eric's blog for more context (PM on the Developer
Relations team. We have been migrating blogs since 2017 and enabling employees
to export / migrate their blog. To your specific issue, ex-employees that want
their blog posts can email me dan(dot)fernandez(at)microsoft(dot)com and I’ll
route to the support team. This does not include comments as the MSDN/TechNet
blogs are not GDPR compliant (aka the right to be forgotten).

As for why, other community sites like TechCommunity are driving blogging at
Microsoft for individuals, while product teams are looking to group official
blogs (Windows, Office, and Visual Studio), and for blog posts that were
really tutorials, moving them to open source documentation on
[https://docs.microsoft.com](https://docs.microsoft.com) on GitHub. Customers
ran into a number of issues where blogs provided out-of-date content/guidance
that lead to support issues. For example, of the 16k+ blogs, 86% had not been
used in 18 months and thousands were created with no posts or only a single
blog post. Cheers,-Dan

~~~
ericlippert
Thanks Dan, much appreciated.

------
euroclydon
To be fair, Microsoft is doing a great job with their new docs site, and I
can't blame them for wanting to centralize and refine the search ranking
toward their new pages.

Some still have thin content, but I've been pleasantly surprised to keep
finding the new docs as the top search results. Just a year or two ago, it was
a crap shoot.

As an example, here is the top result for "C# Synchronization Primitives"
[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/dotnet/standard/threading/o...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/dotnet/standard/threading/overview-of-synchronization-primitives)

------
dao-
last Archive.org snapshot of Eric Lippert's MSDN blog:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20190301145321/https://blogs.msdn...](http://web.archive.org/web/20190301145321/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ericlippert/)

------
swatkat
Microsoft completely messed up the awesome Sysinternals forums when it was
migrated to Technet.

------
atesti
If his blog was now finally moved including the comments, why has oldnewthing
lost all its comments?

------
skookumchuck
For years I'd comment code using links to reference material, like the API
documentation for an API call being made. It was very handy. Links to
Microsoft online documentation, however, tended to go stale very quickly. And
it didn't just go stale, it would disappear (google could no longer find it).
A lot of COM/ActiveX documentation has disappeared. I don't understand why
Microsoft does this.

~~~
Someone
They don’t want people to keep writing COM/ActiveX code, and they don’t want
search engines to point you to such pages, so why would a commercial entity
spend money to keep those pages around?

Hosting costs may be peanuts for them, but there’s also maintenance. Even if
they don’t bother updating the look of the site, there’s the fact that old
sites eventually run on no longer supported technologies that may only run on
unsupported OSes, both potentially riddled with security vulnerabilities.

~~~
ericlippert
I take your point, but VS twitter is this week running a series of short
videos with Larry Osterman about how awesome COM is, which seems to argue
against this theory.

That said, lots of times Microsoft's left hand does not know what the right
hand is doing.

~~~
pjmlp
Hi Eric, I also find this theory quite strange, given that UWP is COM.

