Precision Computing

I prefere blog posting.

Tomislav

I gave up on the newsgroups. I spent too much time on our newsgroups answering the same questions over and over and over and over and . . . well you get the idea. Eventually MVPs picked up my knowledge and ran with it, answering all those same repetitive questions. I figured I wasn't needed then. And I might search against them when I have a question, but I've never actually asked a question on a newsgroup. Mostly, I just read the blogs I subscribe to now.

I'm not exactly your target audience, though, so take this with a grain o' salt. I only play with Monad once in a while. Last time for me was probably 4-5 months ago. I'll take some time to play with the new release, of course, because I'm a huge proponent of scripting.

What the . . . why didn't that post?

Newsgroups are a little too much noise to signal for my tastes, particularly when they aren't dedicated to the topic (the case that the newsgroup presents).

I'm nigh-entirely a blog reader at this point.

Blogs only :(

Well.. i try to follow the newsgroups, but it hard to keep up....
therefor i also prefer blogs... it's easy to keep up.. ;)

I'm another blog only reader. I tried following the newsgroup but gave up - not being a dedicated newsgroup meant I spent too much time reading postings and trying to figure out if they were MSH related or not.

Blogs are good for longer posts and article type of stuff. And if your blog is blogs.msdn.com then it's searched along the msdn documentation and forum posts. Newsgroups are not searched.

For responding to specific, perhaps narrow support type questions the msdn forums should be used (newsgroups optionally). Previously newsgroups were used but the forums.microsoft.com support tracking and other things.

Rarely I go search newsgroups and following rant may help understand why:

I think Google (and ones who copy it, *SN etc) are quite wrong with search: What do I care which "medium" I am searching for: blogs, newsgroups, web, books etc? I do not. I should be able to specify: "Now I am looking for answers and the context/problem domain is *this* (monad) - now search every place except places that sell products or services and filter out questions with no answers". If MSN search provides that kind of search I am done with Google. I estimate it will take someone else to do this first.

In same breath that I wrote that, I see how newsgroups already provide a lot of tools for such search: see whether or not question (Thread) has answers (replies), what is the domain (group specific to my problem).

So what is the issue here? I think it just comes down to that I am used to search once, with Google, and by default that does not include newsgroups. I'll only do separate newsgroup search (I rarely browse newsgroups since they are mostly full of very specific questions) when other means give no results.

I think newsgroups could have a second coming, but the underlying technology is old and adding more meta information and features which are found in Forums etc is not really going to go well with the old protocol. Then it could be extended for particular purpose of answering tech questions and you could have a "group" where you'd opt-in to include system information and have some required fields for posting a question automatically come up in the client as form. Group could be fully P2P based with hardware identification tied to joining a group, this would allow to ban spammers by blocking the their hardware ids.


Bla bla bla.

I only read blogs and sometimes forums.

I used to read the newsgroups, back in the betaplace days, continued for a while when m.p.w.s.s came about but tuned out since the crappy scripting language to monad ratio was not to my liking (in fact many of the other scripting solutions on windows make my eyes bleed).

Might resubscribe now, MSH seems to be gaining more and more momentum on the rest of teh intarweb, maybe it's overtaken the other scripting stuff in the newsgroup.

I still don't think m.p.w.s.s is the right place for Monad. It deserves its own space. MSH is not just for Windows Server Scripting.

Blog only...though I just learned that Google offers RSS and Atom feeds for newsgroups. It looks like it might be too high traffic for me though. http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windows.server.scripting/feeds

I only read the blog posts.

Blogs primarily. I can't keep up with reading all the newsgroups of areas that I'm interested in. So please post the good stuff to your blog.

Blog-only

Yep, I've got my outlook rss add-in, until I get one for nntp that doesn't suck I'll be blog-only also.. :)

When I first found out about Monad I followed the newsgroup for a month, but never found anything of interest there.

However, I don't actively use Monad. I did download it once, try it out, and like it quite a bit. Since it requires its own special dotnet framework, I uninstalled it. Once Monad comes into the dotnet mainstream, I'll download it again.

Sorry, but I don't have enough time to play with something I can't yet use in production. I follow your blog (and a few others) to keep up with Monad development.

Looks like I'll base a few more articles on good Newsgroup threads.

@Kevin: Monad has worked with the RTM version of the .Net framework since Beta 2. Feel free to install it and start enjoying a powerful command line again :)

Thanks -- I've gotten it. I thought that RTM was another special, different release of the framework, so I avoided it.

I see. The acronyms do get a little confusing.

"RTM" means "Release to Manufacturing." Microsoft has released a few major versions of the .Net framework: v1, v1.1, and v2.

Version 1 and version 1.1 were released a few years ago, separated by a few months. Shortly after that, the team started working on version 2. They released several betas and community technical previews (CTPs,) and released (RTMd) the final version 2 product a month or two ago.

We've tried to synchronize our Monad betas to work with the current and popular .Net framework betas. So now that the framework is in its final state for version 2, you have our Beta 3 running on the RTM version of .Net 2.0 :)

Please post to the blogs... do people actually still use USENET for anything? :)

Blog mostly! Too much noises in newsgroup.