I live and die with the MSDN Library. It serves as a technical reference on a daily basis for me. However, Microsoft has no talent for versioning the MSDN. About once every year or two the MSDN gets an “upgrade”, consisting of a new look and feel. Suddenly, tried and true links will fail. Pages break. Listings on Google are directed to 404 pages at MS.com. I stumbled into this mess today, following a link from Google to an MSDN article on SNMP and .Net:
Wowsers, Gadget! How many frames do you count there? I see at least 6, not counting nested frames.
Why must Microsoft insist on using frames in the year 2008! Frames might have been cool circa 1999, but I think that nearly every web developer on the planet quickly learned to hate them. Having used the MSDN enough over the last 10 years I have learned that the inner most frame (lower-right), the page with the actual content I care about, enforces that it’s parent frame-set be present. If you try to directly load that inner page, it will reload itself in frames. This allows me to use Firefox to quickly dig out of this nightmare of documentation.
By right-clicking into the lower-right frame and select “Show Only This Frame”, I was able to load the page as I would assume MS wants it to be viewed:
On top of the “frames are evil” argument, I really am peeved that the bad link doesn’t just redirect to the correct page, instead of burying my documentation in multiple, tested frame-sets. Cannot Microsoft, the largest software company in the world, figure out the ASP or JavaScript to accomplish this?
MSDN documentation is mission critical. Thousands and thousands of developers use this stuff on a daily basis. Come on MS, get this stuff working right!
