So Long, MSDN Blog

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.

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.<p>1 - If you don&#x27;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.<p>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.

One favorite trick of Microsoft IT is to delete old instances of SharePoint servers for projects. Where &quot;old&quot; is maybe 3-4 years.<p>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 <i>backups</i>? &quot;What is this word you are using . . . &#x27;&#x27;backup&#x27;&#x27;?&quot;<p>Which is why I just checked <i>everything</i> into source control and told the PMs they could bloody well learn how to use Source Depot.

Comment he leaves in the post:<p><i>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.</i><p><i>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><p><i>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 </i><i>weird</i><i>, man, </i><i>weird</i><i>.</i>

There&#x27;s been a lot of MS content I&#x27;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.<p>BTW. Today is a great day to donate to the Web Archive:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;</a>

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

just posted:<p>&quot;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.&quot;

<i>&quot;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.&quot;</i><p>(E.L., in the comment section apropos wishes for a book)

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

And it&#x27;s back. Thanks to Scott and Dan and all their colleagues for their prompt attention to this matter.

Reposting this comment from Eric&#x27;s blog for more context (PM on the Developer Relations team. We have been migrating blogs since 2017 and enabling employees to export &#x2F; 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&#x2F;TechNet blogs are not GDPR compliant (aka the right to be forgotten).<p>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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com</a> on GitHub. Customers ran into a number of issues where blogs provided out-of-date content&#x2F;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

To be fair, Microsoft is doing a great job with their new docs site, and I can&#x27;t blame them for wanting to centralize and refine the search ranking toward their new pages.<p>Some still have thin content, but I&#x27;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.<p>As an example, here is the top result for &quot;C# Synchronization Primitives&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;dotnet&#x2F;standard&#x2F;threading&#x2F;overview-of-synchronization-primitives" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;dotnet&#x2F;standard&#x2F;threading&#x2F;o...</a>

last Archive.org snapshot of Eric Lippert&#x27;s MSDN blog:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20190301145321&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;ericlippert&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20190301145321&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn...</a>

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

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

For years I&#x27;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&#x27;t just go stale, it would disappear (google could no longer find it). A lot of COM&#x2F;ActiveX documentation has disappeared. I don&#x27;t understand why Microsoft does this.