New MSDN Library provides IE7 Search provider

MSDN 2 Library has been online for a while now. When you visit the ‘old’ MSDN library, you see the following text:

“We’re upgrading the MSDN Library to a new publishing system which provides improved performance, better search relevance, XHTML compliance, URLs which don’t change after product releases, and more. During the next few months we’ll gradually move content over to the new site, although MSDN Search will work across both sites automatically. The first few levels of the Table of Contents (TOC) tree will be kept in sync across both sites; you can select the product/technology you want in the directory tree and we’ll redirect you to the correct library for that content.

You are currently viewing the “classic” MSDN Library located at https://msdn.microsoft.com/library. To go to the new MSDN Library, go to https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/Library.

In the coming months, the documentation hosted in both libraries will be consolidated into a single MSDN Library.“

That last sentence is a nice one…: Microsoft won’t be maintaining two different libraries, but they will be consolidated into a single library.

When I visited the ’new’ MSDN Library for the first time, things looked pretty much the same to me. Maybe some links and functionality moved to another place on the screen, but the basics were still the same. After my first search, I saw something nifty: “[Got IE7? – get our search][3]“. Microsoft developed an IE7 search provider for the MSDN Library. This means you can use the search bar in IE7 to directly search the MSDN Library! It has saved me lots of time already…

[3]: //search.msdn.microsoft.com/search/opensearchdescription.aspx’)

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