Release Notes - January 2019
This post was written by Den Delimarsky, Program Manager in the Cloud and AI division.
Welcome to another installment of docs.microsoft.com release notes, the first in 2019! We are excited to keep improving our experiences with new tools, enhancements to our content and recognize more community contributors!
Community contributors
Our community is the key to many improvements to the documentation we host - chances are, whenever you are reading an article on docs.microsoft.com, it had a contribution from someone just as dedicated to the overall accuracy and quality of documentation as we are. Hundreds of people dedicate hours to make our documentation better for everyone! We would like to recognize a few of them in this month's blog post.
If you are interested in contributing to our content, start with our contributor guide!
Valeriy Novytskyy
Also known as 01binary on GitHub, Valeriy has done a fantastic job making our ASP.NET Core documentation better by improving the security code samples. Code samples are what developers start with in their projects and explorations, and we are happy to see those become more complete and reliable.
Dave Brock
Dave has been an active contributor to the ASP.NET Core docs. He submitted more than 10 different pull requests to make our documentation more accurate and user-friendly in the span of just a few months! He can be found on Twitter as @daveabrock.
Lynn Park
Lynn is a new contributor to docs - with her first PR just merged in our Entity Framework docs! She is a frequent reader of docs.microsoft.com who decided to give back, and bravely made her first open source contribution. You can find her on Twitter.
Content releases
As our product offering grows, we aim to always ensure that we provide the most up-to-date and relevant documentation for our users - this month, we've grown our content library one docs.microsoft.com with the addition of new Java API documentation for Azure Media Services, .NET API docs for Windows Server 2019, REST API documentation for Data Lake Storage Gen2 and an update to Cognitive Services QnA Maker Python docs.
Features
markdownlint extension to support Docs custom Markdown
One of the most popular components of the Docs Authoring Pack for VS Code is markdownlint by Microsoft developer David Anson, which helps contributors make sure their content follows Markdown best practices. markdownlint is now extensible, and the Docs engineering team has started adding custom rules to support Docs-specific Markdown extensions. These rules are installed as part of the Docs Authoring Pack, so if you use the pack you don't need to do anything special to start linting Docs Markdown.
More custom linting is coming soon, including checking for secure links (https://) and syntax linting for Docs alerts, such as [!NOTE], making it even easier to contribute new content to docs.microsoft.com!
Footnotes
There are more things planned for this year across so many areas of our documentation space! To stay up-to-date, make sure to follow our blog and Twitter account. If you have any feature suggestions or ideas, don't forget to open a new issue on GitHub!