MSDN Subscription site getting a new look and new download utility too! Yep, FTM is joining Clippy...

The MSDN Subscription Team Blog  - Coming Soon to MSDN Subscribers!

"Mark Curphey here (@curphey on Twitter and www.curphey.com on the web). I am the Group Program Manager for the Server and Tools Online Subscriptions team. We develop the Subscriptions web site and the infrastructure that powers your MSDN (and TechNet) subscriptions experience. There is a lot of exciting things that have been happening behind the scenes and we are going to re-birth this blog to start sharing the news so look for regular updates from now on. You will see posts about how features work and about new features we are releasing from the Program Management team, posts from the developers about how we do development, and our architecture and from the test engineers about we test our code. As a teaser I want to share a sneak peak about two things we will start rolling out in beta this summer (starting at the end of June). Small print: The screen shots may not be exactly the same as the final experience, we are an Agile team after all!

There are two big improvements to talk about (and many more in the pipe):

• New Web Experience for Subscribers
• Super Fast Downloads from the Azure ECN

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Super Fast Downloads from the Azure ECN

We currently serve files from three data centers around the world and have been working hard to move our downloads infrastructure to the Azure Edge Content Network (ECN). The Azure ECN has a large number of nodes all over the world and so if you live in New York for instance you would pull files from a node that will be both closer and faster than you get them today. When you use the Azure ECN you will also be promoted to install a new modern download client to enable you to pause and resume. At this point the gallery erupts with happiness at no more File transfer Manager! We know, we are cheering here as well! Its hard to predict just how much faster this new system will be as it will depend on where you live but we can confidently say that it will be orders of magnitude faster for most users and we will be able to scale much better at launch events. ... "

A better and faster MSDN Subscription coming soon makes my Monday much less gloomy... :P