Blog Post: Where to post your questions in Microsoft Forums

Hi all,

As some of you know, I manage about 120 MSDN and TechNet Forums for our division.  One thing I see constantly is questions that are asked in the wrong forum, and this never results in a high probability of getting an answer to your question, and getting an answer is what everyone wants!  I’ve already written a post on “How to post effectively in Forums”, so this is a follow-up to that, with some pointers about how to find the right place to ask your question.  You want to find the Forum with the greatest amount of experts in the area you are asking about, right?

Due to the evolution of technology communities at different rates by different groups within Microsoft, we have two major Forum platforms that do not share a common code base.  The reasons for this are complex and involve lots of things that happen inside a large corporation, so I won’t go into details.  What you do need to know, though, is that it is impossible for a Moderator to move posts between these sets of Forums, so it is important that you at least get your post in the correct set of Forums, or your chances of getting a good answer quickly decrease drastically.

ASP.Net, Silverlight and their associated technologies all work on the Telligent platform at http://www.asp.net.  MSDN, TechNet and Microsoft forums all reside on our own framework at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories and http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories.  MSDN is more geared toward Developer technologies, while TechNet is meant for IT Pro based issues.  I have put together the following table to help:

ASP.Net and related technologies	http://forums.asp.net
Silverlight	http://forums.silverlight.net
Microsoft Answers	http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us
Windows Phone 7 development	http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/default.aspx?GroupID=19
Visual Studio and Developer issues	http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories
Windows Server, SQL Server	http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories

 

 

Jennifer Scholle Tatiana Zavialova Tila Tequila Tamie Sheffield Kelly Monaco