MSDN Link Spring Cleaning

Every year or so the folks who manage the MSDN and TechNet websites decide to update the site is some way and pretty much break every single URL referring to their content. Traditionally this hasn’t affected MSDN Magazine but the magazine now joins the club and older links to MSDN Magazine articles no longer work either.

Since most of my articles are either published by MSDN or MSDN Magazine this obviously affects me. Although it’s too much work to go through all my blog posts and update the links, I updated all the links on my articles archive page a few days ago so that you can easily find one of my previous articles online:

Kenny’s Articles

Hope that helps.

Published Tuesday, May 27, 2008 1:56 PM by KennyKerr

Comments

# re: MSDN Link Spring Cleaning

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 4:00 PM by Brian Henderson

So much for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)... omeone should introduce the MSDN Team to URL Templating & Routing to make the site more RESTful for users (including search-engines).

# re: MSDN Link Spring Cleaning

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 4:41 PM by KennyKerr

Brian Henderson: they did actually attempt a link-friendly system with URL rewriting which was nice but I think the MSDN content base is just too massive and with all the languages they support it just becomes a nightmare. That project seems to have been canned as I can't find it anymore. I'd be happy if they just used guids as long as they stopped breaking the links.

# re: MSDN Link Spring Cleaning

Sunday, June 08, 2008 4:50 PM by bw

I hate it! All my links, all my documents and all my stuff that contains links are now broken (again).

I just can't imagine how stupid you have to be to work for Microsoft and do something like this, do they hire space monkeys with no clue about the real world?

For programmers it is just like Wikipedia would suddenly change all their links, just because some stupid manager would like to put it on his glorious achievement list.