Hi all,

From now on, I am not going to add new articles to the MSDN Knowledge Base
(Community Solutions). Instead, the articles will added to my own web site
(www.mztools.com) and will be listed in the page:

http://www.mztools.com/resources_addin_developers.htm

(I will try to add a weblog in the next days or announce new articles here
directly).

Why the change? Apart from the obvious reason of driving more traffic to my
web site, the process of publishing articles in the MSDN Knowledge Base
sucks. A lot. To summarize the painful process:

* Using Internet Explorer, it takes minutes to log me on. Nobody knows why.
Using Firefox it logs me in a few seconds.

* The Community Solutions private newsgroup for MVPs is dead. Nobody from
Microsoft visits it to solve problems. Too bad.

* The process of publishing articles, which is fully automated (no human
being involved) can take a few minutes to make the article live...or some
hours. Many times I write an article as an answer to some question that is
becoming common and I point the person who posted to the article, but
sometimes the article takes so long to appear on the KB that it is
frustrating.

* The InfoPath templates that MVP must use to create the articles:

- Are not suitable for HOWTO articles. Which is the "Symptom" of a HOWTO
article?

- Are outdated. They do not include Visual Studio 2005 in the list, which is
blocking me to create new articles about that version. Office 2003 is not
even listed!. I contacted the top manager (worldwide) of MVPs and he told
that they would take 2 months to place an automated system to update the
list, but 2 months in Internet time is too long, and maybe it is not fixed
at all after that.

- Contain scripts errors: you can not add/remove sections once you get an
script error.

- Do not format well the code samples, sometimes they remove all carriage
returns when pasting the code sample!. I donīt want to get started about
this one...

So, finally I gave up some days ago and I have copied and reformatted all my
KB articles to my web site. I have updated some of them with VS 2005 info,
mainly to inform that some bug was fixed in VS 2005. If some of you find
spelling errors, typos or inaccuracies let me know.

There are still in the MSDN KB, I will not remove them, but I wonīt add more
there.


Best regards,

Carlos J. Quintero

MZ-Tools: Productivity add-ins for Visual Studio.
You can code, design, locate code and document your apps much faster:
http://www.mztools.com