Hidden features of MSDN documentation

Question

This is both for the local version and msdn.microsoft.com.

Generally I find the MSDN documentation to be very good, but only if you can find what you're looking for. So if anybody has any general tips and tricks, I'd love to hear them.

Answer 1

I use MSDN just like i use wikipedia, don't use their search engines, they suck, instead use google to search trought their site and get the desired result.

Answer 2

The only thing that I really use is Google using that kind of search query

site:http://msdn.microsoft.com/ stackoverflowexception

Answer 3

I found this blog post by Jon Galloway about putting the MSDN site into low bandwidth mode to be quite useful:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2008/08/30/msdn-low-bandwidth-bookmarklet.aspx

Answer 4

For the local version:

• F1 to automatically lock Visual Studio while MSDN is updating the indexes
• Press search to take minutes away from your life while it finds incorrect results online
• Select the Index tab for start wandering around millions of items not relevant to your work

Answer 5

just google what you want to know, I get an MSDN entry near the top almost every time

Answer 6

The advantage of using MSDN Search (and not a lot of people are aware of this because they "gave up" on it a long time ago) is that it provides "refinements" that allow you to scope your search down to just official docs or just blogs with a single click.

For example, http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Search/en-US/?Refinement=117%2c27&Query=stackoverflowexception gives you results just from the .NET Framework 3.5 docs.

MSDN Search's autocomplete is also a bit more targeted than Google's. For example, type "overflow" in the MSDN search box vs. Google and compare the autocomplete.