I can’t remember where I read it….

MSDN Lightweight View

Following on from my last post on the MDSN Low Bandwidth View, Scott Hanselman recently tweeted about the beta version of MDSN Lightweight View.

In a similar way to adding (loband) before the .aspx part of the url, putting (lightweight) before the .aspx part of the url will use the new lightweight view of MSDN, meaning a much neater and streamlined version.

In addition, Scott has previously posted about the other modes of MSDN:

Note that the dev10ide view Scott mentions seems to have been removed, and that the lightweight view is currently in beta, so may be liable to change.

Add comment Permalink July 7th, 2009 Adrian Banks 1593 Views

MSDN Low Bandwidth View

Several months ago, I read a tip about passing an extra parameter on the url to MSDN documentation to put it into “low bandwidth” mode. I remember doing it at the time, but almost immediately forgot the url switch. That was until last week when I read Eric Nelson’s post on how to do it.

The trick is to put (loband) before the .aspx part of the url. For example, the low bandwidth version of

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object.aspx

becomes

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object(loband).aspx

Once you have accessed it, you can persist it by clicking on the “Persist low bandwidth view” link.

Since Eric wrote his post, it seems that a “Switch on low bandwidth view” link has been added into the normal MSDN pages to enable it to be switched on without hacking around with the url.

Jon Galloway has a post that summarises the benefits of the low bandwidth view. For me, the biggest benefit is the speed of loading, since the page doesn’t run lots of JavaScript to sync the contents tree to the currently displayed article.

1 comment Permalink April 8th, 2009 Adrian Banks 1491 Views