Thursday, April 2, 2009

MSDN Loband Rocks

I mentioned MSDN Loband a few months ago. Well, they’ve updated it, and the update kicks some serious butt. Check it out here (the root of the MSDN library) or here (the docs for System.Xml.XmlReader, which show a more typical page). Note the navigation links on the left side, particularly the absence of the tree, and notice how much more streamlined – and therefore faster – the HTML is. I even had a friend tell me that it works pretty well on an iPhone over 3G…in New Zealand!

Now, once you’ve decided you like this version much better than the old one, click the “Persist low bandwidth view” link in the upper right corner and rejoice in the fact that you will always get this view.

I can pimp this one with a clear conscience because I had nothing to do with implementing it. Kudos to the team.

11 comments:

  1. Am I missing something here Craig? All the links from the XmlReader page appear to take me to the non-loband version of the site

    ReplyDelete
  2. Because of the way the rendering works, you'll need to click the "persist low bandwidth view" link to make sure that the other pages you visit show up in the low bandwidth view as well.

    I'll pass along a suggestion that they emit the cookie non-persistent at first.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The speed difference is amazing! I am missing my version links though. We still do quite a bit of 2.0 only coding so it would be nice to have the links to see the different versions.

    ReplyDelete
  4. @Michael: Thanks for the feedback. I've passed that along.

    ReplyDelete
  5. You can cross to the 2.0 "version plane" by sticking '(vs.80)' in before '.aspx'. It will stick as you navigate around after that. I'm sure there will be a longer term solution.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Wow! Great stuff!
    I realize that as more "smarts" are added to the loband pages, they will become less and less loband, but I sure wish they had (sticky) language filtering. I really don't want to see long code samples in VB, C++, and J#. The loband pages work great on my iPhone, but there's a lot of scrolling involved when there's a code sample in every language.

    ReplyDelete
  7. @Joel - if you're using FireFox, a very simple GreaseMonkey script can be used to suppress the irrelevant language samples.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Wow, I really like the UI updates! I wrote a LOBAND toggle bookmarklet which makes it easy to switch in and out of LOBAND mode: http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2008/08/30/msdn-low-bandwidth-bookmarklet.aspx

    It's still working with their new updates.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Lightweight mode is even cooler. :)

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default(lightweight).aspx

    ReplyDelete
  10. Ooh - yeah, that is nice.

    ReplyDelete