Project DescriptionA project to create a client based application to interface with the new MSDN Forums platform.
July 08 CTP (Community Technology Preview) Now available!
After many months of hard work we are proud to announce the availability of our first CTP of the Microsoft Forums Client. Much of the work for this CTP is in foundational code that will let us build the rest of the application, but we hope that this first preview will let you see what direction we're heading in, and also give you a chance to give us feedback!
July 08 CTP Features: Read only offline client that supports
- Getting the list of available forums
- Subscribing to forums you're interested in
- Manually (by right click menu) synchronizing the Question and General Discussion threads in a forum
- Reading posts that have been synchronized
- Hierarchical (threaded) view of conversations
Upcoming Release Features We'll be sharing more information soon about what will be coming in our next sprint worth of work,
which should include our first "write" capabilities for the forums.
If you're interested in contributing to the project, whether its feedback or code, please contact us in the Discussions tab!
What are we doing here?
My team and I are undertaking an endeavour that has been highly requested for quite awhile. We will be creating a client side solution to work with the MSDN Forums. Several attempts have been made in the past to solve this problem with varying degrees of success. This time around we have the support of the forums team to make sure that a public API is available on the brand new forums platform.
That doesn't really tell me much about your project...
You can find the detailed initial scope document
here. In the scope document you'll find some more details about what kinds of things we want to do (and a couple we don't), a sample user scenario, and some information about our team.
What do I get out of this?
Well, if you are a frequent user of any of our forums sites and wish you had an offline option this is an excellent opportunity for you to drive the requirements so we don't build the wrong tool. If you are a developer wanting to try out some cool technologies like WPF, WCF, or maybe even LINQ if we need it, this would be a great sample app for you to learn from and also contribute to.
Okay you've hooked me and I'm excited, how can I help?
There are a couple ways for you to contribute to the project.
- Tell us what we're doing right or wrong. Feel free to give us your feedback using the Discussions tab and let us know if this would be an useful tool for you, or if you think we're heading in the complete wrong direction.
- Tell us what you would do! If you have other great ideas on features that we should consider you can either create a discussion in the Discussions area, or create a work item in the Issue Tracker for people to vote on.
- Put your code editor where your mouth is. Eventually we're going to have to actually write the code for this thing. When we get to that point we will have plenty of opportunities for you to contribute to the project in a tangible way and to help implement features.
-Jeremy Kelley
Program Manager
Developer Division Community Connection
Microsoft
