DDJ: I've already seen places in the Wiki where a discussion starts. Where somebody will say, "Don't implement this interface." And somebody will say, "You absolutely should implement this interface." I can imagine that kind of thing will happen a lot when it's just part of the docs. You'll really end up with discussion threads in the comments. And it would be kind of interesting, as a user, to see what was hot.
Rob: There's a good example what could've happened, about a year ago. There was a flap over a help topic that provided guidelines regarding test-driven development (TDD). For those who were proponents of TDD, it kind of flew in the face of what they felt TDD was about. There was a lot of discussion that took place away from the article. You had to happen upon somebody's blog, or Slashdot, or wherever the conversation was going on. The conversation wasn't going on where the content lived. If you were new to TDD and read the help topic, you wouldn't know the content was held in contention. If you stumbled upon the argument without the context of the help topic, you had to wonder, "What is this content that they're talking about?" You'd had to follow through to where somebody linked to it, jump over to that page, and read the content. Then you had to jump back over to where the conversation was taking place and try to join in with the conversation. It would have been very cool if that conversation would have taken place right there in line with the documentation.
DDJ: So anything you eventually find under MSDN, whether it's an article or whatever. You'd be able to have this sort of community content section that shows up at the bottom of it?
Molly: Potentially. Technically anybody who publishes content on MSDN will be able to add the community content section to their pages. Teams will be able to decide whether they want to add it to their entire documentation set and to and individual white papers and articles.
DDJ: And I would imagine that there will be a certain amount of pressure to do that from the community.
Molly: Yes, we've gotten lots of questions from people who are using the current site about when the documentation for other products will support community content.
DDJ: If people have suggestions and feedback, should the post them to Microsoft Connect?
Molly: Actually that's the best place to post suggestions because they come directly to our internal bug database. They definitely get looked at that way.
DDJ: Thanks for taking the time to chat.
