Sheng Jiang

A Microsoft MVP in Visual C++
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Where is the forum for...
 

There are many other forums that you can explore that might be right for your Microsoft-related question and here is my personal list of those. If you believe you found a Microsoft bug you can also discuss publicly it to get more votes when you submit to Microsoft's public bug database. More votes means the bug is higher on the todo list.


List of a few forums on Microsoft's site, including IT professional and software developer forums

http://forums.microsoft.com


For software consumer qustions  

http://answers.microsoft.com


For designer questions related to the Microsoft Expression Studio

http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc136519.aspx


Windows Help and Support site with community supported newsgroups. Very helpful with Vista problems.
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com


The MSDN newsgroups cover most development discussion that are not covered in MSDN forums. This includes Platform SDK.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroups. If you are not confortable with a web based reader, visithttp://www.microsoft.com/communities/guide/newsgroups.mspx to find how to access the newsgroups via an NNTP newsreader.


There are several Microsoft products teams host community content on their own web site, such as ASP.Net, IIS, XNA/DirectX, Silverlight and Expression. For example:


ASP.NET has its own forums for web programmers which also covers Windows Web Developer Express edition.

http://forums.asp.net


For web server administrators and IIS extension (ISAPI) developers, IIS also has its own forums.
http://forums.iis.net


For multimedia, game and graphics application developers, the XNA and DirectX team (Including DirectDraw and DirectSound, but not DirectShow, which is now part of Windows SDK) is hosting their forum on xna.com.
http://forums.xna.com/


For IE users, there are Internet Explorer and Outlook Express newsgroupshttp://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/dgbrowser/en-us/default.mspx. For IE extension developers, and web developers who need to support IE, MSDN has forums for IE extension development and web development.

For Microsoft Office users and business application developers, Microsoft Office newsgroups including InfoPath, Project, Visio, Sharepoint Server and more. (C++ programmers may need a VBA to C++ translator)
http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/FlyoutOverview.mspx


For Microsoft Outlook business application developers
The Outlook Community (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905464.aspx) has many resources. Many Outlook MVPs have their own web site that contains useful tips and samples.


Networking development communities, including higher layer libraries and services like Microsoft .Net base class library's networking classes , Peer to Peer (P2P) Networking, Quality of Service (QoS), as well as lower layer APIs like Winsock, Windows Filter Platform (WFP) networking, WinInet, etc. For some reason web related forums are also listed on this page, such as ASP.Net, Silverlight, IE and IIS forums.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/network/bb190188.aspx


For people who want to discuss ways to redistribute their software using Windows Installer and ClickOnce:


InstallSite contains Windows Installer information for developers. Desktop Engineer's Junk Drawer and AppDeploy.com is for IT professionals who need to deploy application to multiple computers in a cooperation. For ClickOnce, Visual Studio's Setup & Deployment Projects and Windows Form control deployment for IE, the official forum is athttp://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/winformssetup/threads/


Choosing a forum in MSDN forums for software development questions


For language questions such as syntax or compiler for a language, ask in language forums such as Visual Basic Language,Visual C# Language and Visual C++ Language. Language forums are not for everything can expressed in a the language. That's why other forums exist in the first place.
 
For IDE questions like how to use Visual C++ or C#'s Wizards or how to change IDE settings, ask in IDE forums such as Visual C# IDE or Visual Basic IDE. Note Visual Studio shared features may have their own forums, like forums under the Visual Studio,Visual Studio Express and Visual Studio Team System categories. There are forums not under these categories too, such as the Windows Form Designer forum under the Windows Form category.

For questions regarding class libraries like the MFC, ATL, .net framework classes under the System or Microsoft namespaces, ask in library forums like forums.asp.net, msdn forums under the .Net development (System.IO belongs to the Base class library forum), Windows Forms and Data Platform Development categories. 

Some products such as Visual C++, Visual J# and Visual Foxpro may not have their own Language/IDE/Librariy forums on MSDN right now. They will have general forums for questions for Language/IDE/Library questions instead.

There are other forums for other questions. For example if you get a security exception when trying to open a file using the System.IO.File class, you may want to post in the Common Language Runtime forum if you think it is related to .Net's security settings, or the Security for Applications in Microsoft Windows forum under the Software Development for Windows Client category if the cause is NTFS/Active Directory permission settings.

Of cause this is not a complete list of msdn forums. So do a search to see where questions similair to yours get frequently answered (not just frequently posted).






There are many mail list and newsgroups not controlled by Microsoft.

Here is a list of Mailing Lists and Newsgroups