New MSDN Search Alpha

That's good to know. The current MSDN search is awful... I use google on the site instead...

I hope they add some easily accessible filter to the root page of their new search (language).

Done, but with errors on page.

- Stee

blowdart wrote:

It's littered with RSS now

nonMSDOMBrowser is undefined

declare __nonMSDOMBrowser ==shAit;

Steve

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/search/WebResource.axd?d=gE1Q04bIbLkYmbE0Z4nK1w2&t=632742086647208229

Why the hell is that even accessible?! NEVER Reveal a web service url in a page... They dont understand their own technology, bummer.

- Steve

blowdart wrote:

Steve411 wrote: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/search/WebResource.axd?d=gE1Q04bIbLkYmbE0Z4nK1w2&t=632742086647208229 Why the hell is that even accessible?! NEVER Reveal a web service url in a page... They dont understand their own technology, bummer. - Steve

It's a labs box? *shrug*

Hey All, couple of points to address here...  Thanks Blowdart for the advertising.

1) We're in the middle of tracking down an apparently random failure from one of the boxes in the cluster to serve one or more of the callback scripts.  (hence the random wierd JScript errors)  It's pretty late here in Redmond, so we may not get it sorted tonight.  The code is in our Lab at the moment - and will go onto our beta boxes when we get the error cleaned up and better tested.

2) Steve you're a little off the mark wrt. to WebResource.axd.  This is new client-facing handler introduced with ASP.NET 2.0 that delivers dynamically generated JScript to minimize postbacks etc. 

Below is a link that outlines some of its functionality:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/webresource.asp

We're looking to iterate on the design and features over the coming weeks & months, let us know what could make your working day better...

We'll track this and any other threads, or you can email me at the address in my profile, or leave comments on my blog or our team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/msdnsearchblog/)

Steve Butler
Software Architect, MSDN & Technet

blowdart wrote:

It's littered with RSS now

Only did one search but already have a question:

Try search for "temporary files"

The first result sounds quite interesting:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/xcs05e1d.aspx" target="_main">How to: Clean Up Temporary Files  
Under most circumstances, temporary files are deleted when such operations are complete. If a user is unexpectedly disconnected from the database before the completion of an operation, however, the ...
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/xcs05e1d.aspx

When you click it you get:

MSDN Library > Development Tools and Languages > Visual SourceSafe > Maintaining and Optimizing Visual SourceSafe > How to: Clean Up Temporary Files

Visual SourceSafe  
How to: Clean Up Temporary Files  


Obviously I wasn't interested in cleaning up temp files in SourceSafe, but in Windows or possibly IE (since that's what I was using to enter the search), otherwise I had specified sourcesafe or the search would have inferred it automatically (had I tried to use the search from SourceSafes Help for example).


The result only tried to hint that this has to do with "database", but I didn't read it that carefully. I'd rather had it either not show SourceSafe results at all since I did not ask or clearly indicate the topic has something to do with that particular technology.

If the MSDN URLs would make some sense, that might have also given away the topic had to do with VSS.

If the URLs are like
"http://msdn2.microsoft.com/xcs05e1d.aspx"
Why show them at all?

Visual SourceSafe > Maintaining and Optimizing Visual SourceSafe
Had been more helpful in this case..

Thanks Androidi for trying out the search.

You're running into one of the larger challenges of our problem domain - the same term being used in *many* different contexts.  This of course is compounded by some content issues through articles "attractive nuisance" titles in this case. 

We agree that that vanilla site search results for general or broad queries can be pretty misleading, we will be looking to address these issues in future revisions through the use of scoping interfaces like "search from here" in the documentation. 

(possible now with the new API now but the syntax is pretty ugly - example scoped to just VSS docs here...)

We're also working on some ideas around categorized results and one-click result filtering to make it easy to find the "Win32 Temporary Files" and ignore the VSS articles for example.  Watch this space... 

Why Display Urls?  Couple of good reasons - a) they're not always cryptic, and b) basic copy and paste. 

The cryptic URL is requirement to keep URLs around for at least the lifespan of the product - 7 years or more, with multiple revisions in at least 9 languages.  Its pretty tricky do that and keep the URL name stable and meaningful without resorting to IDs.  We do at least support human readable aliases for common paths e.g. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/System.String

We'll be posting on our blog and keeping the labs & live iterations going over the coming months - keep using the pages, let us know what you think!

Another revision of MSDN Search went into Labs tonight - we think we've got the script errors beaten and can no-longer repro the errors.  I'll nod my head to Nikhil Kothari's Web Dev Helper as a great tool to watch browser interaction...

A few improvements in the UI behaviour switching tabs, and cleaned up stylesheets quite a bit,  though there is still more work to do in there.  Quite some back-office work put in to monitor performance and errors.

Feedback and comments as always welcome on all aspects of the project.

Steve Butler
Software Architect
MSDN & Technet Product Group
( Email me... )