How to recognize that an article or demo about asp.net-mvc is out of date?

Question

I've been frustrated with a lot of my time I've spent researching asp.net-mvc. It seems that a lot of the articles have information that no longer applies to the current version of asp.net-mvc and sometimes it takes awhile to recognize that what I'm reading is no longer relevant. Does anyone know of any resources that can help me to recognize that a specific article that I may be reading is no longer useful?

Answer 1

I have run into that issue myself. I generally look at the publish date and if it was published before the release candidates started showing up (Late January 2009) I treated it with caution. I sometimes go as far as to use advanced Google searches to search for articles published after January 2009.

Anther good option is to check out information that is to be published in a book since it will (or should) be based on the RTM version. You can view some of Stephen Walther's chapters here.

Answer 2

This is one of the more serious problems with a search-oriented research strategy - you don't get the context necessary to determine whether what you've found is relevant.

You're lucky it's MVC you're researching. Imagine looking for information on a subject that's been around for years. It used to be the case that searching on MSDN for "web service security" (no quotes) would find a majority of articles on the first page - about WSE (Web Service Extensions, obsolete code that was replaced by Windows Communication Framework). I've corresponded with several people who used WSE for their first secure web services because they found it by searching MSDN.