Microsoft Developer Network

Except things weren't adding up.

Eventually I went back to the MSDN documentation and started actually reading it myself.

The capability wasn't supported the way the AI had told me it was.

It had sent me down a rabbit hole.

And I also have always been learning.

And I found that a lot of the places, like back then it was like Experts Exchange, and then it became Stack Overflow, and Microsoft had the MSDN forums.

And I always worked at a consulting company.

And so our customers were usually bumping into the problems that were reported on those forums.

Mm-hmm.

It was, uh, Microsoft documentation was called MSDN, Microsoft Developer Network, and you had your, your, basically your giant PDFs or, um, or like literally print, printed, printed technical manuals.

Oh, wow.

Uh, that was pretty quickly replaced by, by, you know, internet, um, and, and HT- HTML documents.

You could go download it.

You could get it from MSDN.

There was this developer network site where you could get a membership for, I think it was like 300 bucks a year.

And you could get access to any software that Microsoft had, accounting apps, Word, Windows, anything that you wanted.

And it was scary for a closed operating system company, right? Because, gosh, what would happen? And Linux had huge ambitions, as we all knew, and some things grew, some things didn't.

But at the time, it was kind of all hands on deck, you know, sound the alarm, what are we going to do? And Microsoft had some serious issues with discoverability on MSDN and TechNet, which were...

the development platforms for IT professionals and developers, respectively.

Developers went to MSDN.

IT professionals went to TechNet to get their information.

And the reality, if those platforms aren't discoverable, how can you expect developers to develop on the Windows platform, right? It's a big problem, right? So kind of quietly found this little startup that had this cool algorithm that was pretty wild.

And why was one better than the other? But this one seemed to be a little better.

So let's dive in.