Microsoft and Stack Overflow have long been friends, with Microsoft sponsoring its tags on .NET Framework and Visual Basic. Now they have taken their relationship even further and teamed up on Stack Overflow Documentation.
“Both docs.microsoft.com and Stack Overflow had shared goals,” said Microsoft General Manager Jeff Sandquist,“we want to make it easy and simple for the community to contribute great documentation for using products and services.” He points out that like Overflow, docs has an open license and uses markdown.
Microsoft’s Role
Microsoft will integrate Stack Overflow into the docs.microsoft.com API reference in the future. Though the service was developed by Stack Overflow alone, users of Docs will see the benefits.
On the Microsoft Docs website, developers will be able to see examples from the Stack Overflow community, as well as Microsoft’s own experts. The Stack Overflow list will be curated by Microsoft to ensure that all of the .NET coding guidelines are met.
The service offers a tag based categorization of topics, making it simpler to filter by topic. The tags pull from the StackOverflow community, and once clicked, a card based list appears. The cards show some data upfront, including the number of topic requests, proposed changes, and improvement requests.
Topic requests give the audience a place to identify shared problems. Users can create a topic, provide code samples, and also their own documentation. Using the new categorization system, Stack Overflow suggests the correct place to post it. Naturally, it can all be edited with markdown.
