Welcome to my new home on the Microsoft Developer Tools and Services blog site
Hi, everyone. The Microsoft Developer Tools and Services folks have been kind enough to give my blog a new home. The new site has a mobile-friendly design, and redirections have been put into place¹ so that links to the old site will come here.²
The Developer Tools and Services folks also created a really nice graphic for me, which I’ve put at the top of the home page, though you don’t get the full effect unless you’re on a large screen. Sorry.
I’m still trying to figure out the new site, so don’t be surprised if there are things that look weird. In particular the formatting of most posts is messed up. I’m working to fix them in my copious spare time, but it will take a while to update over 5000 articles. I’m working backwards, so the oldest posts will be the last to be updated.
The new site doesn’t give me as many customization opportunities as the old site did, so my SVG and CSS magic diagrams may not come out right. I’ll work with the blog hosting folks to see how much of it I can get working again, but my first goal is to fix the worst of the formatting issues.
One thing you’ll probably notice is that comments from the old site were not carried forward. Sorry.
If you have other questions about the blog migration, you can check the Developer Blogs FAQ to see if they’re answered there.
If you have questions about the new blog site that are not answered in the FAQ, you can ask them here and I’ll try to find answers to them.
¹ Redirections for posts from February and March of this year haven’t yet been set up. Thanks for your patience.
² This blog has moved so many times, you can probably get some sort of frequent-traveler reward for going to a really old link and redirecting through multiple sites before finally landing here.
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69 comments
Can you explain the Sorry link to data protection/ GDPR?
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer. I’m not affiliated with the blog team or Microsoft.
EU data protection law requires that users have the option to delete content they submitted. On the old blog that was done through a “request removal” button below each comment, when logged in as the author.
Carrying the comments over would mean that there would have to be a way to identify the authors of old comments in the new blog system. I guess, that this is a non-trivial problem given that the new blog seems to use another authentication mechanism for Microsoft Accounts.
It seems to use one that actually lets me use my work profile to login to the blog, whereas the old one didn’t.
My psychic decoding: If the old comments are carried over, it’s much harder to deal with comment deletion requests (authentication and stuff, cuz the new site uses a different account system). Citing the previous post: “It would be a lot of work and we are lazy.”
GDPR is not retroactive so all comments before 25 May 2018 could at least be carried over:-) But yes, lazy.
Or even … all comments on posts that had comments closed by then, no?
I do appreciate that you set up redirects. Many sites are just lazy about that or don’t get most of that in place before they make the switch.
It would be nice if they just kept the old site up without redirects, at least for a couple of weeks so archive.org can get a copy. The comments are often almost as good as the main post and losing them is very sad. Comments on most of the posts going all the way back to the .net era should be in the archive except for a little stint where comments came from silly javascript and failed to archive properly.
Archive.is supports archiving from Google cache, I’ll try to save as many as I can on there…
Most of them (from the last couple of days) should be on Archive.is now. A couple of comments missing here and there and all comments from “What order are pages in a memory-mapped file flushed out to disk?” are sadly gone (1 visible in Bing cache, at least 8 gone).
Can you please change the RSS feed to include full post content, rather than just a summary?
Thanks,
David
Two thumbs up for this request!
Yes, definitely. It’s not that I’m trying to avoid your really nice title page graphics, but having content show up inside the RSS reader saves me from a burdensome two extra mouse clicks.
Also, full posts gives me a nicely sorted archive without the bother of filtering emails, nor of wondering which mad path I saved last year’s posts under… I need to have a word with the person in charge…
Yes! Please!
Yes, please. RSS should include the whole post.
Oh, and maybe check in with the Microsoft folks running the site and see why the commenting system doesn’t respect the “show name publicly as” setting on the profile. It seems crazy that after all these years of various web forums, they still can’t get basic functionality of “allow user control over their public persona, and use current setting when displaying all comments, including ones posted before the setting was last change” to work right. I guess twenty years ago that seemed advanced, but these days?
Having full post content would be nice. +1 vote
+1, this was jarring when I first saw the new posts. If I find the post interesting I’ll click it anyway.
I asked the server people if they could change it, and they did! Do be aware that I am even less in control of the blog server than I was on the old site.
Thanks!
I was hoping that one day that back-end system would understand `MarkDown` in comments, and retroactively re-format correctly done markdown as styling.
Little did i guess that a stray country would mandate that all that valuable knowledge be purged from the Internet everywhere.
Posts from Sept – Dec 2004 seem to have missed the transition, e.g., https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041014-00/?p=37573 not only redirects to a broken page, but even manually going through the archive there aren’t any posts I see from that time range.
Yikes! Thanks for reporting.
Redirection of even older URLs seems to be broken. E.g., http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/07/24/8768095.aspx doesn’t take me to a “correctly formatted” URL.
The RSS feed is producing duplicated entries in Outlook… But that’s not a big deal — only the recent ones are duplicated.
It’s not just you; I use SeaMonkey for RSS and I have dupes (but not all of them) back through March 4th. Probably some get resent when a blog moves house.
I really miss number of comments on front page. The rating is gone too, but that I don’t miss as much.
This comment has been deleted.
It seems when logon IE11 my account name is correctly displayed as cheong00 (the display name), then in Chrome it uses my full name instead.
Really strange.
And as I changed my full name, I found that I can no longer edit/delete my posts.
Is it using name instead of some kind of userid to distinguish between accounts? //horror
EDIT: Seems “Edit/Delete” is only available during the same session as you posted the message. After you re-login these buttons are no longer displayed on the post you made in previous session.
The only way to edit is still in “All My Comments” section.
Okay. I found my first comment in “All My Comments” section of my profile to delete it.
The “user name” of the post now changed from my full name to “anonymous” now. I guess I’ll settle the settings like that for now.
And here’s the original message in the first comment:
“Oh a WordPress site. Not really see that coming. For some reason when I try to post message with IE11, as I’m typing the message the switch out the focus, the textarea become readonly and I can’t type in anymore. But since I see a lot of error throwing out in debug window, I guess we can conclude IE11 is no longer supported here.”
I tried to send comments regarding issues I encountered on this site, the greeted with “Recipient address rejected: Access denied [BL2NAM06FT010.Eop-nam06.prod.protection.outlook.com]”
Perheps the most important thing when Raymond have chance to talk to them is that their email address (devblogsfeedback@) is not accepting (some) external mail.
Yup, the server team is working on it. In the meantime, they recommend using the Feedback button in the bottom right of every page.
When you’ve clicked on a link and gone into reading a post, there doesn’t seem to be any route back to the listing of posts other than the browser back button. And yes, it’s a shame that the titles get truncated on the front page. Other than that, nice refresh and I’m sure we’ll all get used to the new look & feel soon enough!
Is there any way to fix the order of comments? Newest on top is annoying.
>but it will take a while to update over 5000 articles
Seems like it would be considerably easier just to add wayback machine links – just a generic header that says ‘If this page looks funny, try it’s archived version here.’ Added bonus: they have the comments too.
Oof. The loss of comments is actually quite a shame. I actually quite enjoyed going back and rereading some of the exercises for the reader, or even just seeing the mindset of computer geek from 5/10/15+ years ago. Or sometimes I just wanted to shake my head at xpclient again.
Absolutely. The comments on some articles were valuable additions, especially when Raymond got involved. We can always have the Internet Archive’s version I suppose.
This is one of the few places on the Internet where I will read every single comment on every single post. Great little community here 🙂
1) Loss of comments is extraordinarily disappointing. I get why you’re doing it, but jeez, there were so many intersting and insightful comments in the last 15 years.
2) +1 to Jernej Simončič’s comment: can we get oldest on top please? And have it always load all comments immediately, instead of only loading N comments and hiding the rest behind a “Load More” button?
3) Is it possible to fix the title of the web page to reverse the order from “The Old New Thing | Article Title” to “Article Title | The Old New Thing”? I like to read all of the recent articles’ comments and keep them open in a bunch of tabs, and now it’s impossible to figure out which tab corresponds to which article, since the tab titles all look like “The Old N…”.
4) I see there are Bold and Italic buttons in the comment box’s toolbar. Would it be possible to get a preformatted code button too? (Or does HTML/BBcode/Markdown work for that?)
Edit: Whoa I have no idea why everything turned blue there. That’s, uh, a bug.
Looks like the blue text got fixed (thanks!), but now all of my paragraphs got reflowed into a single paragraph. Not sure if that’s a new bug with the blog styling or just a mistake made when you (presumably) edited my post.
(The text looks the same whether I’m logged in or logged out, so it’s not a reoccurrence of the bug with the previous version of the blog software noted in recent months where paragraph breaks appeared deleted for logged in users but appeared correctly for logged out users.)
Is it possible to add even more whitespace to the design? /s
So I’m not sure if this is intentional or not, but after logging in to my Microsoft account I can now access a WordPress dashboard with profile customization and other little features. While it’s not letting me do anything nefarious (so far as I can tell), this is pretty unexpected for a Microsoft-hosted blog and it seems like it wouldn’t be hard for a bad actor to probe the dashboard for known vulnerabilities and gain additional access.
It would be nice to see comment counts on the post header in the list view https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ like it used to have. I normally don’t keep posts open to follow comment threads.
Being a reader of your blog for about 7 years by now I’m sad to say that…
The new design is just plain terrible. The one who got hired for doing this should have been fired instead.First of all, it doesn’t work well on my older smartphone, so this has nothing to do with “mobile-friendliness” they’ve marketed to you, Raymond. The pages became more bloated internally: more additional network requests are required now to load page completely. The UX is seriously worse than before:* a few people have already mentioned the “Load more” button which just hangs there to have page covered with an overlay for a while and find out that there was nothing to load;* ellipsis at the end of literally every piece of text is the feature of the century;* a lot of screen space is just wasted while the buttons and links are quite small which also is the opposite of mobile-firendliness.The note about losing comments just makes me wonder how this even got to production.
Not even to mention smaller bugs like having a new comment displayed in a different font than the others, losing the space between the lines of text in the comment when it is loaded for editing, etc.
Agreed. This new blog is atrocious.
Also agree. Half of your titles are too long and are cut off! Has the designer ever read a blog before? I can’t believe anyone looked at this and thought the job was well done.
As long as I’m posting, I should make it clear the content is still great and I’ll come back for that.
This is such unbelievably bad UI. So much pointless whitespace on the overview page that many of the titles don’t fit. Newlines for titles? No, just cut them off. Book cover on every entry taking up even more space for nothing. Absolutely no navigation options besides “next page” and “previous page” unless you manually enter a specific URL… so much for “mobile-friendly”. Seriously, WTH.
The design claims to be mobile-friendly, however, the area with the text on a phone has shrunk compared to the old design by something like 2x. The navigation for the archives is no longer available in the form of links either, you have to type the URL – pretty bad for mobile where typing is hard. I am not even going to talk about the loss of comments – this is a complete travesty. All in all, this migration has been a major fail. We’d have been much better off simply with no changes at all, rather than with this set of changes.
Hi, one thing I miss from the old site is the navigation pane on the right. I liked finding old articles by tag or by month/year, is there a chance that this can come back or have I just not found the feature?
Please use the Feedback button to request site design changes. The direct archive URLs still work, they just don’t appear to be advertised anywhere: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/2019/01
Hello. I’m having a hard time reading the articles. Could the fonts be made darker or black?
Please use the Feedback button to request site design changes. I don’t control those.
I appreciate the pragmatism in your post, but as someone who’s read your blog for more than 10 years and trailed behind you in all these transitions, it’s astonishing to me how often Microsoft feels the need to mess with these blogs. I can’t help but notice that none of the FAQs on that page is “Why are we doing this?”
The loss of past comments is unforgivable, regardless of what scapegoat gets troted out. I also really (really) miss the old soothing yellow background (many thanks to Jan for https://userstyles.org/styles/121616/the-old-new-thing-classic-style, which was perfect for the last few years).
Also apparently spellcheck=”false” is set on the comment box for some absurd reason. I guess I’ll shout into a paper bag^W^W^W^W^Wsubmit feedback about that and see what happens.
Yikes. 2019 and newlines are still too hard for blog software. And no edit button for me when I realized (holy balls) it’s actually been 15 (!) years since I started reading your blog.
PS: Browsing the archives is remarkably difficult. The only option appears to be going page-by-page for almost 600 pages. What a delightful design.
You can use the secret archive links: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/2018/ (annual) or https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/2018/12/ (monthly).
In case someone has trouble finding the feedback button: Your adblock solution probably removed it.
It should be located in the bottom right of the page.
Hum the blog ate my comment when I posted shortly after this came online. Admittedly the server was rather overloaded..
Anyhow: Could we remove the picture for every post on the home page? It takes a lot of space (and I already bought your book 😉 )
This is precisely why people hate Microsoft, if you choose to understand it.
Lately, I’ve been picturing myself interviewing you, like James Lipton on “Inside the Actors Studio”… because you’re such a facinating person, and I have so many questions to ask you. [One of my core functions is to understand the NT loader without reference to source code.] But also, I feel the need to explain to you why even the highest thinkers hate Microsoft. It is not simply a knee-jerk anti-Microsoft reaction when one discovers for the first time that GetVerion() is lying to you based on the application’s manifest. Microsoft, despite being rooted in Seattle, is just like the Rebublicans: “we will lie to everyone, we will do whatever is necessary, we will even do what is wrong… simply to retain our position of power.”
And now, I learn from Slashdot that Microsoft is going to pester me to upgrade from Windows 7. Windows 7: the last version of Windows that (optionally) presents the UI that I want. Yeah. [Picture Matthew McConaughey in that Lincon commercial.] Oh yeah, like I want Windows 10: I want a “Start” menu with advertisements. That’s totally what I want. Yeah. I’m being sarcastic. Not at all: some of us actually want to get work done.
Now I learn that all my past comments here–from over a deade ago–are lost. This is why people hate Microsoft. Need I explain this further?
“Now I learn that all my past comments here–from over a deade ago–are lost. This is why people hate Microsoft. Need I explain this further?”
No, no it’s quite clear that you won’t try and understand the reasons behind actions since it’s much easier to simply “hate Microsoft”.
Why bother understanding the problems behind GetVersion (and why guidance has been for decades to not do version checks but instead check to see if the feature you want is there) or why it’s really complicated to transfer personal information from one website to another under the GDRP, if we can simply complain loudly?
The reasons behind loss of comments were “we have to somehow map old accounts into new ones and we don’t want to add means to do that”. Compared to the effect of the loss of comments – a huge loss of value, because on this particular blog, as well as on several other MSDN blogs, comments carried something like 80% of the value – this is just pathetic. At the very least, there should be a readonly copy of the old site with the old comments available for reading. That’s how others do these migrations.
A new comment to help debug the site behaviour.
Login with MSFT account works, with Google account does not. So I may not be myself today… Anyway, I wish the RSS feed would consistently include the entire post; makes it a lot easier for quick skimming a bunch at a time. It’s gotten spotty since the Grand Move.
I have no idea how many moves I’ve followed, but I’ve been reading here a long, long time….
The loss of comments to all previous posts is catastrophic.
I have been a reader of this blog since its inception and the knowledge I got from it was enormous. But the majority of the knowledge actually came from comments, not from posts! In terms of knowledge, the value of this blog has been roughly: 20% in the posts from Raymond, 20% in the comments from Raymond where he was answering comments of others, and 60% in the comments from other people, who were asking the right questions or answering them or providing valuable insights otherwise.
Without comments this blog just lost 80% of its value. This is completely unacceptable!
Now, I understand that this isn’t Raymond’s fault. However, is there a way to *at least* bring up a readonly copy of the old site with the old comments? Raymond, please, could you ask whoever migrated the blog (and was moronic enough to just strip all comments with no second thoughts) to please make a readonly copy of the old one? Please.
Also, I just have to say it. The new site is slow – much slower than the old site ever was. It is unbelievable how long pages take to open – we are talking 5-15 seconds. Yes, I submitted this as feedback already, but this just cannot be said enough times. The “upgrade” has been a strict downgrade so far.
Just timed the refresh of this very page to make it painfully easy to understand what it is I am talking about. The refresh took 7.8 seconds. And even after that there was quite a bit of activity in the status bar (using Chrome, no plugins). Anything longer than 2 seconds is unacceptable, and completely out-of-this-world unbelievable for the type of content we have on this page and its amount (utterly miniscule).
Well, one bonus is that I’ve lost the (Copy 1) from my account.
Comments used to auto-close 2 weeks after a post was posted; if this comment is submitted successfully, then it seems that’s no longer the case.
I know this is quite an old post now but it seems the most appropriate one to reply to. Your posts used to show up regularly on time, practically every day (it was 3pm for me except on days between DST transitions (as in, my DST transition has happened this year, yours hasn’t, or vice versa)).
But since the move, they don’t seem to be showing up at the same time. Have you lost the ability to schedule your posts or does it not give you fine grain control over the exact timings?
Scheduling is not working. Even automated posting is not working. (The XML-RPC endpoint accepts the post but does not publish it.) Must be done manually. The server folks are investigating.
And BTW Ramond — and I know this might be heresy… I personally have always belived that Windows has a better design that of Unix/Linux. Partially, because I dont want some stupid clone of an operating system from the seventies. My problems with Windows are the following: the unfortunate accident of the VMS pathnames. The unforunate accident of drive letters. Through an accident of history, it doesn’t fit with the C language. Also, Control-C should have singled an event object. It should not create a new thread.
It should not have taken me four minutes to figure out how to post here again.
Now I am tasked with revising our Visual Studio toolbar yet again. I only did that last year. Because Microsoft no longer has stable APIs. They want to blame developers for their own ineptitute. “Asychonous loading?” The VS team thinks that will solve their problem? VS is dog slow. “Asyncrhonous loading” will not solve their problem. VS 4.x will fire up much faster on far weaker hardware. So now, because of Microsoft’s mistakes, I have to do something twice? Three times? Four times? I’ve already solved the problem of integrating with Visual Studio. Now I have to do it again? Do I have to do this every other year? But of course, Microsoft can be this rude to developers, because it’s Microsoft. Windows even runs the ticket machines at the local Metro train station.