MSDN ScriptFree layout - NICE!
- When I visited MSDN today I noticed a new box encouraging me to try a new layout (loband IIRC) and then I noticed there was also an option for ScriptFree. The first one (that was encouraging me in the first place) was not to my liking (idk, just not my style) but the ScriptFree is IMHO so much nicer.
It's clean, it does it's thing, it doesn't take up as much space. It loads faster.
I'll be using it for now, and if I can find some more constructive feedback I'll offer it, but for now just wanted to offer some appreciation to the devs.
Cheers
Please don't forget (and feel free to remind me) to post if you got the answer you wanted, and select who really answered your post when you do so future visitors will know too! Remember, this is .NET 4.0 in a .NET 3.5 world, you're a pioneer right now.
All Replies
- Really nice.
Jonny Great, loads way faster and is much cleaner, focused on content.
- ScriptFree is reallly cool, I always like plain and simple. Way to go!
- Liked it.
Thanks. - Tried all three, I'm liking the scriptfree the best.
- Of the 3, I like script free best.. plain and simple
- Love the script free!
- +1, liking it clean and fast.
Dwayne Robinson - Yep, even with broadband Internet and a fast machine, I prefer the ScriptFree over the other formats. You get the info you need, without all of the distracting extraneous elements. Thanks MS!
- +1
ScriptFree is awesome. I wish more people designed sites with simplicity and function in mind above all.
Keep up the awesome work. - +1
Love ScriptFree! - same here. lightweight is a close second.
- ScriptFree is fantastic. Wish it was available years ago.
It's so good I even signed in to post this, (and that's saying a lot). - Signing this thread!ScriptFree is really great,, i like it...big turn on msdn!
- ScriptFree, compact, clean, simple - just super :)
- I like the ScriptFree layout quite a bit ... it's simple and fast.
I think a little more work could go into the navigation pane on the left, however. It's not clear, without playing around with it a bit, how exactly it is divided up.
-Trevor Sullivan Great effort and inspirational work. I really like it. Though i do agree that both ScriptFree and Lightweight need work on the left panel navigation.
Regards,
kashif- I agree - ScriptFree is the best
- Script Free is certainly the best. The main reason being; most of the time, I hit msdn from a search engine and just want that page content. I rarely use the navigation within msdn. And SF loads the fastest, cleanest to read. beautiful.
- Nice efforts MS team :)
Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality. - Dalai Lama MSN: kalilani@hotmail.com - Yahoo: kalilanipk - True, "Script Free" looks nice, you can search for the contents easily, everything is clean and tidy
- Very nice nad very fast ..... I too liked the ScriptFree View.
Thanks Developers for giving this option. - Really great view. Also I quite like the fact that the top div with MSDN picture was made small.
- Nice, Fash and Clean
I hope learning C# better using this new look - +1 for the Script Free lok, fast, easy to read and efficient. Also looks the best.
It's clean, it does it's thing, it doesn't take up as much space. It loads faster.
Ditto. Like the ScriptFree best of three options.- ScriptFree is the best.
- Finally some Real Estate optimization as the old site had 2 x 2 pixels of content area left :-)
Should be able to adjust the width of the left menu . Don't control the user, let the user control the site!
Solution Architect specialised in integration (EAI/SOA/A2A/BizTalk) based in Toronto, Canada. http://blog.percepsys.com - Giant thumbs up on the ScriptFree.
- Scriptfree rocks! keep it
- Love it!!!!!!!!
- I like the look, but I really don't care for the left-hand navigation. I prefer the 'classic' view as the left navigation frequently gets obscured in the other views. I also like the fact that the main content stays in place while scrolling the navigation.
- The ScriptFree view presents a clean, easy to read and fast loading page. It's purely focused on the content. I'll be using this view for as long as they keep it around.
- Very Nice !!!
Wow. 34 replies and all positive. Maybe I'm unusual, but for me there are so many things wrong with this page layout...and they have been there for years. First, several people complained about left nav. I rarely use it because most of the time I'm looking for details on a specific property, method or event (PME). Once in awhile I have time to browse the docs like a catalog, but rarely. I say, get rid of left nav as it wastes real estate. Replace it with a link to the parent object or topic and another link to the table of contents and an index. People search by typing, not browsing through giant lists of stuff.
Now for the details: I typically discover a PME from Intellisense. I should be able to highlight the PME in my code, hit F1 and be taken almost instantly to a page with the following in order:
- PME name, type (if appropriate), link to class (if appropriate) and namespace each on a separate line.
- What is it? A concise description of its purpose and place in the world.
- A concise example which includes the "using" clause and the required assembly reference. Don't make me dig through 100 lines of code looking for a line where the PME is used or hunt to figure out what I need to reference or add to "usings" to use the thing (this would be the case if I did not discover via Intellisense.)
- Move the syntax to the bottom.
Other page design requests:
Let me specify my language with a simple click. Remember it, and don't show me any other language implementations unless I choose. Don't waste a whole chunk of real estate in the middle of the page with tabs to other languages.Put a Search box at the top of each page. Near it let me specify some technologies to keep searches narrow which are remembered from day to day. I should be able to enter these in a predictive text box, comma separated. Maybe I'm only doing Web stuff. Don't show me Windows Forms stuff. I'm a SharePoint dev these days. I don't care about Windows Mobile! Remember, fewer, more relevant results beats tons of irrelevant ones any day.
Run the new page layout past a group of experienced developers and see how they use it. Stop making me use Google and avoiding MSDN unless I want to be irritated.
Thank you for trying to make a dev's life more satisfying.
Brian- I agree, ScriptFree is much better looking and far more usable than the normal theme.
Like the new fast script-free version. I am doing a lot of learning reading through MSDN library and find the navigational tree very useful. It provides me with a structured and categorized way accessing information that is well ordered.
With the script free version, I can also easily navigate through the library and read the articles on my mobile phone IE Mobile. This came really handy a few days ago when I was traveling.
Thanks.The new looks are really good and faster. But the tree view on the left is the best when it comes to ease of learning and reference. Thanks :-)
- Agree, i really like the Scriptfree layout!
- I really like the simple layout of the Script Free design. It still has unnecessary levels of nesting - I would love to see the class members, constructors, properties and fields on the same page as the general class description, without needing to drill down. I also systematically get annoyed at the class method descriptions - the link from the method seems to indicate that there might be a more detailed method description available. Following the link almost never turns anything up. Ideally all of this would be available on the same page. For my use, javadocs does an awesome job of displaying everything on one page. It may be overwhelming the first time you see it, but it very quickly becomes really efficient for finding information.
- Love it!
ScriptFree is simple and nice . thanks.
- Very nice indeed. A vast improvement.
- I've never posted anything on these forums but I've been using the MSDN library for years. ScriptFree is great. So great that this is my first (and probably last) post. Keep up the good work.
I let dozen of comments on MSDN to tell how slow was the loading (mainly because of the very large tree on the left side)... Sometimes I thought it was useless to send comments, noone is reading comments... But I was false : they read them !
Incredible ! The ScriptFree view is exactly what I needed : quick load, simple display, easy to read.
Thanks a lot for these new view option I was waiting for years !
Good job guys !Options are helpful - new options are an improvement on Classic when searching for things like obscure error issues. Making searching quicker as more information appears to be in a page.
- +1 here!Hope there is a whole class page for .Net class library for convenience. I mean something like the Sun java online doc index page and the whole class page for searching specific class.
- I hated to use MSDN before, because it worked so annoying slowly, and used google instead to search for .NET documentation.But thanks to Scriptfree, now the speed is good, and google is not needed any more.Good job! I wish every developer to focus on simplicity, functionality and speed!
Not only saves a lof of space for more useful information, but also looks nice and neat.
An experienced programmer of vs- Agree with most of above. ScriptFree is great!
- @Brian (Ferd Berfel)
I'm in the same boat as you, "Wow, who expected this many replies?!?" I was just saying thumbs-up to the devs.
But you're somehow upset at the new layout. My advice is simply "Don't use it". Use what you like and are familiar with. I doubt they'll kill the classic layout in the next five years.
Secondly, you _do_ realize you can navigate right to an element if you'll just understand the URL, right?
Also, they are caching a lot of stuff. Like language preferences. And this begging for a search box means you're not using this as a reference, so goto Bing if you want search.
And fwiw, I am a dev. For more'n'a dozen years now.
Please don't forget (and feel free to remind me) to post if you got the answer you wanted, and select who really answered your post when you do so future visitors will know too! Remember, this is .NET 4.0 in a .NET 3.5 world, you're a pioneer right now. - OK, Cole, since you invited a reply, here goes:
Yes, thumbs up that at least the speed problem has been addressed. I prefer fast over fancy any day.
"Don't use it". Heh, so what else am I supposed to use inside MSDN? This is the only page layout they offer in terms of what is displayed and in what order.
"Navigate to an element using the URL". Wow, that's a nifty user experience for a site designed for developers! Come on! But I decided to see what you meant, so I went to the C# ++ Operator at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/36x43w8w.aspx. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how to get to the && operator by modifying that URL.
Begging for a Search box. Uh, I'm not begging, just pointing out that it's missing from the page. And *of course* I'm using the MSDN Library as a reference. Who has time to browse around thousands of pages...I have work to do. Bing will give me 309,000 pages about the ++ Operator. I only need one. I tried it and naturally the first hit is for a page that does not help me with the ++ Operator. So this is not a solution.
"You're a pioneer right now." Huh? Microsoft has been in business for how long? And I'm supposed to feel fortunate that I get to pioneer their pathetic new attempt at documentation? It's inexcusable. The UNIX man pages I used in 1984 were better designed. - Definitely like the ScriptFree layout, even on my 30MBps cable at work, the old layout was kinda of cludgy at times, this is great =)
- I resurrected my ancient MSN account to comment on this--the ScriptFree layout is incredible.
- Couldn't agree more. I love the speed of the Script Free layout. The pages look much cleaner and easier to navigate without the user interface clutter.
Please make the change permanent!
Bill - ScriptFree is the way to go.
- ScrptFree is great, much cleaner, lighter and faster!
but also true, navbar takes a significant amount of space, no search textbox (maybe not so bad because of search in the browser itself) and the thing that gets me the most, no way of changing to information on other versions, for SQL2008 I always like to see the version of the documentation for SQL2005 and in .NET take a peek in both directions 2.0 and 4.0.
Great job, keep it up! - I like the script free version in that it looks clean and loads quick, but it's a backwards step in terms of functionality. Without the big tree you get lost in the nav and without the fancy breadcrumb trail you can't explore the documentation as easily. These are good features but I think they were just implemented in a big clumsy manner
- I agree with Cole, ScriptFree the way to go. Thumbs up from me :o)
- I loved it and the lightweight layout - makes it easier to find the information that I need, by devoting most of the display area to viewing information. Until today I've always avoided visiting the site because it was too painful for the reward - now I feel much more comfortable using it. Congratulations for the new design :).
Although I do prefere the lighter version, I would like it even more if the default font size was 100% instead of 0.7 em. In my opinion the default font size on web pages should always be 100%, and to be reduced or grown only when necessary as in headings and so on.
I like the look, but I really don't care for the left-hand navigation. I prefer the 'classic' view as the left navigation frequently gets obscured in the other views. I also like the fact that the main content stays in place while scrolling the navigation.
I really like how there is very little clutter and clean content with the ScriptFree version. But I like how the left navigation provided information about this page's (1) child pages, (2) sibling pages, (3) and parent pages. This information could be captured near the bottom of the page and free up the whole left nav area for content. My 2 cents.
