It's MSDN, but More Usable

So, I started writting this blog back in April and completely forgot about it.  Better to post late than never I suppose.

I use the MSDN site on occasion and have always found it rather wanting.  Not because of a lack of content, but the speed of the site and the small content view caused by the large header (which you previously could not get rid of without some GreaseMonkey magic).

It appears that people are listening and there are some easter eggs that you can play around with.  Scott Hanselman has a great write-up on the easter eggs and Jon Galloway has a more focused post.  Apparently some of this information came out late last summer, but I had not heard of it until a couple months ago and it's never too late to spread the information.

There are 3 easter eggs that I am a huge fan of, namely the Low Bandwidth view, PDA view, and the Visual Studio 2010 view. 

To get at the easter eggs, it requires some URL magic.  The MSDN developers use a form of URL routing (read Scott's post if you want a more information) using the contents of the parathesises as switches.  You may have seen the "(printer)" prefixed to the "printer friendly" view before.  This uses the same concepts.

My favorite is the "Low Bandwidth" view: (loband)

You can test it out by checking out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spsolution(loband).aspx

The "PDA" version (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spsolution(pda).aspx) is very nice when you just want the information and just the information.  The Visual Studio 2010 version (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spsolution(dev10ide).aspx) will probably be my favorite in a little while... well it would be if it still worked.  Perhaps Microsoft is pulling a trick from the TV studio's and getting read of the good stuff.  At any rate, at least they the loband and pda version's still work.