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For the past few days, been doing some coding in .net, and needed some info on a certain namespace or two. Went to google and did some general searches, found some forums where users had posted links into M$ MSDN.. All the links are dead (meaning M$ changed their damn MSDN format).

Sooo... that would mean that all MSDN links everywhere are dead links.....

Very discouraging....

Perturbatio

Sooo... that would mean that all MSDN links everywhere are dead links.....

Clearly they've never heard of 301 redirects

Winni

You can always install a local version of the MSDN Library:
http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/msdn/Default.aspx

clownhunter

I'd complain some more. It always helps.

Or you could just install the MSDN Library as Winni suggested.

WendellM

Sooo... that would mean that all MSDN links everywhere are dead links.....

Sounds grim, but maybe it's not all? I just checked a couple of oldish links that I'd bookmarked and they still work:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa905330.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb206295.aspx

These are from back when Vista was new. I noticed that they redirect from "msdn2" to "msdn" so I did a little looking and found this from May, 2007:

You might have noticed lately that the MSDN site has changed its domain name to MSDN2. Beginning last fall, the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) group has been using a new publishing tools and had to keep the content published with the old tools separate from the new. As you have probably figured out, MSDN2 is the site that uses the new tools.

You might also have noticed that the URLs have changed more than just in the domain name. To keep our file names unique, the file names are for the most part now page IDs, rather than page titles. For example, "item" is a property of many objects and there are several "item" topic pages in the Library. The IDs make sure that no two "item" topic pages can have the same URL.

Over the winter, documentation sets were slowly migrated from one domain to the other. At some point in the future, the MSDN2 domain will once again become just MSDN and will keep the new scheme for file names.

So, what does this mean to you? Well, actually not much. If you're creating links today, you will have to use the MSDN2 URLs. Old URLS that point to MSDN (the old domain name) are redirected to MSDN2, so you don't have to worry about them.

If you link to MSDN2 pages, redirects will be put in place when MSDN2 reverts to MSDN. These redirects will not go away. Over time, you might want to correct them, but they will always work.

Dark Half

I'd complain some more. It always helps.

Thanks for your 2 cents!

Or you could just install the MSDN Library as Winni suggested.

Because links others have posted are ALWAYS pointing to their LOCAL copy of MSDN right?
Good job! Let me find you a prize, hold on!

@WendellM
Yeah, the thing about those links is that:

Revised April 2007

Updated: March 2008

Thanks for the post about MSDN2 though, that explains a bit.
Now that I go back through some of the searches I find some of the stuff I was looking for was general vbscript stuff, and some of the links are from 2004 and 2005. One is a knowledge base article on server 2003 (dead). Although I did do a search on a directsound namespace (I forget the full namespace path), and I remember that clicking on some of the methods in the actual MSDN online library went to dead links, however if I navigated from the left hand pane (the tree) it would work....

I guess It's been the whole week finding a lot of dead links (not all dead, just a lot)

Just erks me when they change stuff.... I know it's necessary, but it erks me none-the-less.

Winni

If links that others have posted don't work, it's hardly Microsoft's fault. MSDN & MSDN Library are commercial, subscription based products with members-who-paid-for-it-only services that you might not be able to access. The MSDN Library has an own search engine that might not be the best in the world, but helps you find the articles that you are looking for.

So do a good job, keep your prize and just learn how to use your chosen set of tools instead.

Dark Half

So do a good job, keep your prize and just learn how to use your chosen set of tools instead.

and why did you reply?