This is a win-win for both SO community and MSDN. SO has a lot more Q/A on .NET than any other platform/tech. That means there are a lot more .NET folks on it. Good luck to Joel, Jeff and SO community.
Stack Overflow (well really, google, but SO usually comes up pretty close to the top) has become my go to resource for looking up problems and usage scenarios for my .NET dev. MSDN is woefully lacking in many respects and it's much easier to find relevant results on SO.
In general I find the MSDN information to be lacking. It's about as dry and straight-forward as you can get and rarely does my search for the 'answer' end there.
It would be nice if you could choose to see these results mixed in or not. A check-box next to search field maybe?
I find I end up using the two different sites for different things. Stack Overflow for when I need help with a problem, and MSDN as a reference tool for the capabilities of a section of the framework. Integrating the two will be a great help.
I hope MS doesn't use this as an opportunity to put even less resources into MSDN and Help.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I used to be able to hit F1 to get context (good) sensitive help in Visual Studio - this hasn't worked for ~5 years for me. Luckily, it doesn't matter that much because of all the non-official sources...but I'm just curious why MSDN and help seems to not work, at all.
Back when I was trying to use MSDN, I could only assume they had a team of people whose job was ensuring that every document got a new URL with every major release, and that none of the URLs they had already assigned work anymore. Maybe if they had fewer resources they'd waste less time making both bookmarks and their own search results useless.
They also bring in results from codeproject.com. This definitely makes MSDN search a first stop for tech-related info. No more weeding out experts-exchange or software.informer results from my Google search.
I'm curious about the weighting they give for different sites. Some search terms don't bring in results from StackOverflow like I thought they would.
It's nice to be able to go to one place to look for some .NET API. I no longer need to Google search a topic, and then open multiple tabs, each for MSDN, SO, experts-exchange, and other forums.
Fantastic stuff for certain communities. Using Google to site-search SO.com is a wonderful resource. I'm not a .NET developer, but if I were, then I'd appreciate this data-aggregating shortcut.
