Developers should be quite familiar with Stack Overflow: the community, which boasts some 4.7 million members, is one of the most important repositories of knowledge for programmers of all kinds. Now, those working with Microsoft technologies will be able to make even more use of Stack Overflow: Redmond just announced a new partnership with the platform to support the new Stack Overflow Documentation for Microsoft developers.
The new Stack Overflow Documentation beta, touted as the “biggest expansion to Stack Overflow since it first launched”, is the new developer documentation platform for Stack Overflow members, focusing on code examples instead of the usual Q&A. Examples will be curated by the community, with the most helpful going to the top based on a voting system. Documentation is expected to be the new home of instructional programming knowledge or general reference that often got left out in ask-answer sessions as Stack Overflow moved more towards Q&A.
Microsoft has had a long relationship with Stack Overflow, sponsoring its related tags on the platform like .NET Framework or Visual Basic, and now it is also one of the pioneering supporters of Documentation. Specifically, the company will be integrating Documentation content into its own API reference content at docs.microsoft.com. Microsoft also provides a tour of Stack Overflow documentation for .NET developers, which covers activities like requesting a topic and viewing the example code.
Soon, developers using Microsoft Docs will be able to see both examples from Microsoft experts and the Stack Overflow community. Microsoft promises more details of this direct integration; stay tuned for more Microsoft developer news in the future.