Links and Toys of the Week (June 8, 2009)

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Here’s a few toys and great reads that have kept me entertained for the last couple weeks:

IIS SEO Toolkit Beta Now Available!

If you manage a personal or company Web site and haven’t heard about this yet, get ready to be amused. The IIS team released last week the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit Beta – a free toolkit that helps Web developers, hosting providers, and server administrators improve their sites’ relevance in search results by recommending how to make them more search engine-friendly. The SEO Toolkit Beta is available for installation via the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta.

The IIS SEO Toolkit Beta is a piece of the larger Microsoft Web Platform strategy, which enables developers and end-users to build great websites, experiences, and achieve success in the Web ecosystem.

Some of the great features this tool includes are: customization of crawling (you can ignore ‘nofollow’ attribute and ‘noindex’ metatag, define #links to crawl, and consider internal linking from groups of directories and subdirectories). You can also get SEO violation reports, query results using a UI query builder, generate sitemaps, page inventories, reports of external and internal links,  and much more. My favorite one is the keywords suggestions view:

msdn_OfficeSEO[1]

We’ve already crawled MSDN_Office and we’ve found lots of SEO violations. We already started fixing critical issues and our Web site will benefit extensively by using this tool and following best practices recommended by this tool. If you are interested in improving your site for SEO, this download is a must!

Here’s a few great reads and sites for download:

Stsadm SilverLight application is live on TechNet

If you are doing SharePoint development and configuration and struggle to remember Stsadm commands, you should check out this super cool application. It provides a fully browsable interface, in-depth information from the TechNet TOC and library, and links to specific topics for each Stsadm command line operation and property. By using separate XML data files, the SilverLight application is instantly updatable and localizable.

image_3[1]

You can find the Stsadm SilverLight application on TechNet here:

Some other blogs posts where you can find more info about this tool:

MSDN thinking out-of-the-box and Scott Hanselman’s blog

Even after years of getting my hands on Office development and loving it, I still continue being a passionate Web developer. I still keep my addiction to anything ASP.NET, AJAX, Silverlight, and Web platform in general.  ScottGu’s blog is a great read to keep-up with news from DevDiv. Another fantastic blog to follow is Scott Hanselman’s blog.  Scott is an expert in Web development and a former ASP.NET MVP who is now working with MSDN and providing great insight and suggestions to improve MSDN. He has a couple blogs posts that discuss alternate views for MSDN, including a Low-Bandwith (loband) view and MSDN Updates - and RFC for you. He is currently working with MSDN on a set of proposed let's go crazy here and try some way-out-there-MSDN designs for MSDN Developer Centers. Here’s a couple designs:

MSDN_TRAM_HOME_thumb[1] MSDN_SHOE_HOME_D_thumb[1]

It’s great that someone like Scott is providing all this out-of-the-box thinking and ideas for MSDN. The MSDN Office Developer Center team can’t wait to see the final designs and roll them out to our pages. More here: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/MSDNUpdatesAndRFCForYou.aspx.  You can also follow Scott on on Twitter: @shanselman

Enjoy!