Microsoft has never really "got" the idea of URLs. The only links to Microsoft stuff you should expect to still work properly in a year from learning them are in the form of an aka.ms alias which is publicly advertised.

Anything else, maybe it's a brief article explaining a technology you care about, next week somebody replaces that with a video blog of some people who don't really know much about it but are sure they'll become world experts over the next months and years - and you're invited on their journey, then the blog becomes a wiki, then it becomes an exciting new user-led forum, and then... it's a 404 because they were re-assigned to a different project and all knowledge was destroyed.

Raymond used to be just one of hundreds, maybe thousands of Microsoft bloggers. Then one day Microsoft decided blogging was not on brand and it just blowtorched all the blogs except a few very popular ones like The Old New Thing.

> Microsoft has never really "got" the idea of URLs

I immediately thought of Teams links.

At least make another URL shortener like teams.ms and pass the URL through it before giving it to me.

I wonder if I it's possible to create a file in Windows named after a MS teams link as it's so long.

Is it so difficult to generate a short UUID?

Zoom does it with numbers.

Google Meet does it better with hyphen separated 10 letters so you can even read it out or just remember for 5 seconds before typing it elsewhere.

And I've found aka.ms links, referenced in a current Microsoft help page (KB article?), that were broken...

And even there they deleted all the comments.

That's Microsoft being (the new, not the old) Microsoft... they seriously fucked up the MSDN documentation when it was migrated to docs.microsoft.com, so I'm not surprised that a similar thing happened to the blogs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20351358

they knew they would and they advertised that fact, and made blog and content owners migrate their stuff if they wanted it kept. many chose not to. those are the people you should be angry with.

Many of the people were no longer at Microsoft when the migration happened, but their blogs were no less useful for that.

And some weren't even alive. Michael Kaplan and his amazing blog about internationalization and Unicode comes to mind - thankfully, other people have archived it: http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/

Or they could've just migrated it for them, and kept everything running.

I'm told that MSDN blog posts were owned by the authors, not Microsoft.

it wasn't Microsoft's content to move.

movement to docs.microsoft.com meant giving copyright to Microsoft, and not everyone chose to do that.

that's quite a take.. expecting previous article writers to manually migrate their stuff is just as good as killing it.

the blog authors knew the content was their own responsibility going in.

"quite a take" f u

1) the URLs are simply missing a "b/" in the path to map to saved copies in the Web Archive, and 2) the comment system switched to requiring JS around 2011 so only comments from before then archived properly (>.>) but the threads are all from 2003-2006 so theoretically there are probably no new comments anyway.

nesting windows more than 50 levels deep: https://web.archive.org/web/20110623211503/http://blogs.msdn...

nesting menus more than 25 levels deep: https://web.archive.org/web/20110623211552/http://blogs.msdn...

creating a dialog box with more than 65535 controls: https://web.archive.org/web/20110623211515/http://blogs.msdn...

the maximum number of threads a process can create: https://web.archive.org/web/20110628235212/http://blogs.msdn...

the maximum length of a command line: https://web.archive.org/web/20110707074737/http://blogs.msdn...

the maximum size of an environment block: https://web.archive.org/web/20110623211524/http://blogs.msdn...

the maximum amount of data you can store in the registry: https://web.archive.org/web/20070302025026/http://support.mi... (the live link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/256986 still works perfectly, so here's the view as of ~the post date of the article)

if you have to ask, you can’t afford it: https://web.archive.org/web/20080607185547/http://listserv.l...