As long as I’m picking on Microsoft for releasing developer tools before they’re fully baked — a cornerstone of Microsoft strategy, according to Joel Spolsky — I might as well take a swipe at their laughable not-quite-a-wiki.

At the bottom of most pages on MSDN is a section called “Community Content”. It’s the Microsoft’s way of encouraging participation from the developer community. Ever since Steve Ballmer skipped onstage chanting developers, developers, developers, developers, Microsoft has tried to recapture the attention — and most importantly, the talent — of the independent developer community. Most of those developers have long since fled to other platforms. Most of these alternatives are open source, meaning that they’ll accept contributions from any programmer with a good suggestion.

This is important, because before most good programmers get their first job, they’ll begin contributing to open source projects. It’s a way to gain experience and confidence, while helping to build their resume. Once they enter the working world, they’re likely to stick with the open source technologies they know. Microsoft is painfully aware of this, and not quite sure what to do about it.

Hence the Community Contribution section on MSDN and Microsoft’s recent open source initiatives. It’s their attempt to bring back the magic and infuse their technologies with teh awsum. While they’ve done a great job with CodePlex, and there’s a healthy Microsoft blogging community of consultants, partners, and independent developers, Microsoft suffers many of the same difficulties switching to an Enterprise 2.0 mindset as other large corporations.

So, you’re a developer, and you’ve found an oddity — possibly a bug, definitely a surprise — in one of the .NET framework’s gazillion objects. Naturally, after exhausting all other avenues for help, you found yourself (shudder) actually reading the documentation on MSDN. Unsurprisingly, it makes no mention of the quirk. You think to yourself, hey, maybe I’ll leave a note using this Community Content thingy. So you click the “Add new content” link and see the following screen.

How many problems did you spot? OK, the image is a little small. I’ll enlarge and highlight a few things.

First, if you’re trying to encourage participation, never, ever, say that this is “not the right place”. If someone wants to make your website better by adding detail, let them. If it turns out that the contribution is not relevant, you can always edit, move or moderate it later. And if you must point out that another forum or communications channel is more appropriate, at least be so good as to provide a hyperlink to it. This is the web, after all.

Second, don’t scare your users with legal threats. They won’t work. The nice users won’t contribute to your site out of fear, and the obnoxious jerks will post whatever they want anyway. It’s self-defeating.

And did you spot the third, final problem? This one’s tricky.

There it is: I’m already signed in to MSDN. They know who I am. I’ve agreed to their terms and conditions once already. They can ban me from the site if I don’t behave. Or they can leave my inappropriate post right where it is, so that everyone will know what an obnoxious jerk I can be. This entire page is nothing but a waste of time.

I could have said something incredibly useful. But hey, I’ve got important things to do. I don’t have time to read through another Microsoft EULA, thanks. Instead I’ll just get back to work.

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