MSDN/TechNet Doc's Now Available via Public SOAP API

CraigBlog - Announcing the MTPS Content Service

"Over the last few months, you’ve seen me drop vague hints about the work I’m doing at MSDN. Well, today we launched it at a TechEd chalk talk (DEVTLC03), so I can finally talk about it: the Microsoft/TechNet Publishing System (MTPS) Content Services.

 

In brief, the MTPS Content Services are a set of web services for exposing the content in MTPS. MTPS is the application I helped write a few years back that stores and processes all the content at MSDN2. With the web service, you now have programmatic access to all that data via SOAP. So if you want to embed access to the documentation for System.Xml.XmlTextReader into your application, go for it. If you want to know what the child nodes of System.DateTime.ToString() are in the table of contents, you can go and find that, too. I expect to see some fairly interesting uses of the service pop up in the near future. There’s such a huge amount of good information in MTPS that I imagine lots of people will want to leverage it.

 
The web service is reasonably well-documented here ..."
 
That’s pretty cool. Providing the tons of MS dev/tech doc’s via a structured API, helping integrators bypass the URL & screen scrapping games.

One usage comes immediately to mind (well a number of uses came to mind, but this one seemed a little more original)... A learning curve site.

The current MSDN TOC is great if you know what you are looking for. But when you are first trying to learn an area you know little about, the TOC can be frustrating. So it’s googling to help find the initial links to get you over the initial hump.

With this new API, I’m thinking a site that helps with the statement, "I don’t know what I don’t know" would be cool. A site help us over that learning curve. For example, I want to start doing some WinMoble 5 development. Okay... Not having done any before, I have a big curve ahead of me. And the MSDN TOC isn’t really focused to help me in that.

So something like a super HowTo site. Or a task based TOC and instead of a technology based one. Or a "Here’s What You Need To Know" style TOC. And all using the actual MSDN/TechNet docs, just reordered...

Well it’s a thought anyway... ;)