Microsoft has released its Microsoft Developer Network Wiki for developers.
In a blog post on Dec. 7, S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsofts developer division, said Microsoft has unveiled a release candidate of MSDN Wiki, which is part of the MSDN Library.
MSDN Wiki is an effort to enable developers to help write documentation for Microsofts developer tools and products. The goal of the effort is to deliver Microsoft developer documentation through a wiki format.
Through the wiki, developers can expand the Microsoft documentation and add such things as community content, tags, examples, and tips and tricks, the company said.
“We announced the broad customer availability of the Community Content feature for the Visual Studio 2005 documentation and the .NET 3.0 Class Library on MSDN Online,” Somasegar said in his blog.
“The Community Content feature allows our community of developers worldwide to extend the official online documentation by adding tips, notes, code examples, and other information alongside the over 300,000 topics already covered,” Somasegar said. Moreover, because the community content is placed in a wiki environment, developers can edit existing content blocks and add new ones, he said.
Yet, only some of the topics in the MSDN Library are currently enabled for community content, and they will be tagged as such with a “Community Content” icon, Somasegar said. And many other Microsoft developer content sets will add the feature over the next few weeks and months.
In her blog, Molly Bostic, MSDN Wiki project manager, said community content will be accessible via MSDN search and public search engines. And it will be accessible through the Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment) when users use the online help feature.
The effort is part of Microsofts attempt to become more transparent as a company and to invite greater interaction and input from the developer community.
The first release is in English, but other languages will follow.
“Although this release only covers English content, localized versions in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Traditional Chinese are scheduled for broad customer availability in February 2007,” Somasegar said.