Microsoft.​com

I wonder what MS used to make its website... personally I think its probably the most comprehensive site on the net, so do you think they used Dreamweaver or Frontpage? =p

notepad.exe

Just kidding. They probably used DEBUG to directly insert characters into memory then save that data to their hard drives.

I thought there was an aricle somewhere about the developers and the architecture of it. I may be wrong but I thought I read that a lot of it is built on web services.

Its all custom development.  They use VS.NET and Visual InterDev.

lenn wrote:

Its all custom development.  They use VS.NET and Visual InterDev.

Content Management Server wasn't up to the job then?

lenn wrote:

Its all custom development.  They use VS.NET and Visual InterDev.

Still use InterDev? There were two version's weren't there (1.0 and 6.0)?

lenn wrote:

Its all custom development.  They use VS.NET and Visual InterDev.

Oh, yeah. That works too I guess.

I hadn't been to Microsoft.com for so long I was shocked to see such large graphics. Looks a lot better than what I remember. I'm surprised I seldom ever visit Microsoft.com given the number of MS products I use. I never really go there for anything other than Windows Update.

rhm wrote:

lenn wrote: Its all custom development.  They use VS.NET and Visual InterDev.

Content Management Server wasn't up to the job then?

Microsoft.com is possibly one of the largest corporate sites in the world, with several million documents and downloads on offer in pretty much every language supported by Windows. 

It represents a global federation of product, technology and marketing groups using a wide variety of Microsoft Enterprise technologies.  Pretty much all of the site is built using Managed Code of some variety or other.

The Homepage and most of the top tiers of site are powered by various versions of a system called MNP - a Web UI framework built on an ASP.NET 1.1 page handler, a slew of custom .NET Applications for systems like profile management, and content from file and content management systems.

The sheer age of the site means there is a wide spread of technology in use - some is bleeding edge, some trailing edge.

We use a wide variety of content systems ranging from filesystem, simple SQL databases, customized CMS & Office installations, to complex XML document-set publishing pipelines such as MSDN's MTPS. 

ASP.NET 2.0/Yukon is core of our leading edge for projects such as MSDN's Whidbey Development Center.  On the trailing edge is legacy content in the shape of ASP pages built in Visual Interdev.

The volume of legacy ASP pages is declining, but our 7 year+ commitment to product content often means it is more practical to keep the legacy content alive than perform costly migration to newer systems.

I have the pleasure of building infrastructure in the MSCOM group. Its sheer scale brings different engineering challenges. Luckily I work with some of the most skilled people in the web industry to make it happen.

Well, thanks for the inside!
That was pretty interesting.

harumscarum wrote:

I thought there was an aricle somewhere about the developers and the architecture of it. I may be wrong but I thought I read that a lot of it is built on web services.

Many of our infrastructure pieces communicate using XML Web Services, WSE.

We also dog-food most of the Microsoft Enterprise technologies.

harumscarum wrote:

I thought there was an aricle somewhere about the developers and the architecture of it.

From the web archive...

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.microsoft.com/backstage">http://www.microsoft.com/backstage">http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.microsoft.com/backstage

I heard somewhere that Microsoft's web site design and graphic art division work almost exclusivly on Apple PowerMacs running Adobe's Illustrator and Photoshop.

...Rather than Dells running Microsoft PhotoDraw or MSPaint

Can you shed some light on this rumour? ktnxbye

I can assure you that our in-house graphic designers work on PCs using apps like Photoshop. 

stephbu wrote:

Microsoft.com is possibly one of the largest corporate sites in the world, with several million documents and downloads on offer in pretty much every language supported by Windows. 

Makes my day brighter.  I only have to maintain and keep track of a couple thousand web pages on our intranet sites.

lenn wrote:

I can assure you that our in-house graphic designers work on PCs using apps like Photoshop. 

You never said if it was an Apple PowerMac or a Dell. Or an HP running XP.

Steve411 wrote:

lenn wrote:I can assure you that our in-house graphic designers work on PCs using apps like Photoshop.

You never said if it was an Apple PowerMac or a Dell. Or an HP running XP.

Right on... "PCs" could be interpreted as "PowerPC"

After all... aren't the "XBox NeXt" dev kits given out to game mfg's just Apple PowerMac G5's? Since the XBox NeXt uses an IBM PowerPC chip

Oh the irony.