Microsoft has changed the MSDN site to provide a better organized single point of entry for developers wanting to find material within Microsoft’s MSDN content.

Microsoft’s Brian Harry, whose team manages the MSDN infrastructure, says that over the past few years, the MSDN site has “atrophied” and become mostly a routing layer for the variety of platform dev centers around the company. 

In his blog post about the new version, he says

“It hasn’t really provided a comprehensive picture of the Microsoft developer platform.  We decided we could do better than that.”

The team has updated the MSDN home page with:

 “an improved experience we’re calling the Microsoft Developer Network.  It is a major update to the MSDN home page and gives you a more modern place to go as a central landing page to find out everything you want to know about developing for Microsoft platforms.”

While there’s much talk of communities, blogs, and an integrated social feed, the most practical change is the ability to get directly to Visual Studio tools and your MSDN subscription from anywhere in the network. The other main change is that the new site is the entry point for all developers no matter what platform you’re targeting - mobile, cloud, or desktop, with information for Web, iOS and Android developers, too.

The changeover isn’t completely seamless, though. Currently, it’s been rolled out in the English version, with other languages to be phased in over the next few months. Other sites such as the Windows Dev Center and the Windows Phone Dev Center are still active.