Wow! Microsoft: makes the MSDN Library available for free download. I am a big fan of the developer documentation MSDN. I’ve worked with IBM software, and the lack of an MSDN-equivalent is devastating to productivity. And I’ve worked with (and continue to work with) open source software, where the lack of decent documentation and organized support materials
is infamous. The investment Microsoft has always made around supporting developer productivity through documentation and MSDN is one of its key success factors – at least in the development world.
And, I don’t think this will devalue the MSDN subscription. The vast majority of the Library is available online anyway, all Microsoft has done here is provided a more convenient way to access the data. It isn’t like they decided to give away the software for free! This is just another small step in Microsoft’s continuing support for developers on their platform.
An MSDN subscription is an unbeatable deal for a developer. The ability to get almost every OS, server and development tool for the purposes of development at just over the cost of Visual Studio alone is really quite amazing when you think about it.
Here is an observation you’ll chuckle at. You have to love the instructions;
- Click on the 3 ISO image downloads available on this page and save to your hard drive in a temporary directory. Note: 2 GB of disk space is required to download.
- Rename downloaded 3 .img files to .iso and follow the ISO handling instructions below.
So why aren’t they named .iso in the first place?
All in all: Great stuff. Although I’m going to use the online version also in the future… Takes less HDD space and is also searchable and nice to work with.
