.NET document design and MSDN documentation

Today I stumbled across this article MSDN Documentation - the worse in class ?. Much of the class library documentation is published to MSDN through Sandcastle. We have been releasing Sandcastle with a “prototype” style which addresses most of Miro’s concerns:

1. Type overview and member list information on the same page.

2. View member signatures on the member list as we show each overload directly.

3. Avoid many clicks to drill down into members since we eliminate having to go through overload pages.

4. Which types implement an interface.

5. Easy navigation between namespace, type, and member levels as we move them to a non scrolling region.

Miro talks a lot about MSDN web site response time. I will talk to MSDN team to see if they can improve the performance issues and suggest they consider an AJAX solution.

Also we are releasing a new version of Sandcastle this week with a new document design called VSORCAS. I will blog more details on the VSORCAS design tomorrow. This design addresses the above 5 issues.

Anand..