Products · Product
MSDN documentation
Raised as a usability problem by 19 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2011–2025), in 19 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Documentation search is poor, making things hard to discoverUnreviewed
20112026- Documentation became hard to navigate; left-side table of contents is cluttered and less useful2022-09-10
- Documentation search is poor and hard to discover things with2020-02-18
- Search is terrible, making it hard to find needed documentation2019-05-21
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 20 complaints
- Hard to find new features in the release notes and docs2025-12-06
- Defaults like FooOptions aren't linked, so readers spend minutes digging for them2025-09-23
- Documentation became hard to navigate; left-side table of contents is cluttered and less useful2022-09-10
- Needed examples from an older year's disks, which were missing and later scrubbed online2022-09-10
- Current MSDN is mostly online, incomplete offline, and links away to the web2022-05-06
- Search never returns a reasonable result, so users resort to Google2021-06-13
- Documentation reads as contradictory, and it's hard to know which driver model to use2020-03-16
- Documentation search is poor and hard to discover things with2020-02-18
- Search is terrible, making it hard to find needed documentation2019-05-21
- Web MSDN documentation is slow and poorly organized compared to offline CD versions2019-03-29
- Docs give unclear status for System.Management, so the reader can't tell whether it's deprecated or supported2018-01-04
- Google searches lead to deprecated docs; up-to-date .NET info is hard to find2017-11-14
- F1 help takes seconds to open a browser and an unhelpful page2017-10-19
- Documentation is difficult to navigate2017-02-03
- Pages take 5-10 seconds to load and reaching class method lists needs 2-3 clicks2016-11-17
- Documentation lacks detail on classes, methods, and parameters, and has no useful examples2016-09-29
- Deprecated page doesn't say which function to use instead, so the reader can't tell the correct one2016-02-11
- Site search returns poor results even with advanced filters enabled2012-05-06
- Searching MSDN is poor, so people resort to Google instead2012-04-17
- Can't find what they are looking for in the documentation2011-08-11