What is Happening? This message is to inform you that Microsoft will soon begin discontinuing newsgroups and transitioning users to Microsoft forums.
Why? As you may know, newsgroups have existed for many years now; however, the traffic in the Microsoft newsgroups has been steadily decreasing for the past several years while customers and participants are increasingly finding solutions in the forums on Microsoft properties and third party sites. This move will unify the customer experience, centralize content, make it easier for active contributors to retain their influence, mitigate redundancies and make the content easier to find by customers and search engines through improved indexing. Additionally, forums offer a better user and spam management platform that will improve customer satisfaction by encouraging a healthy discussion in a clean community space. To this end, Microsoft will begin to progressively shift available resources to the forums technology and discontinue support for newsgroups.
In addition to offering a compelling online browser experience, for those users who prefer to use an NNTP (newsgroup) reader to participate in the newsgroups community, we have developed a solution called the NNTP Bridge which allows a user to connect a variety of supported NNTP readers to the forums they would like to participate in and continue having the NTTP reader functionality. You can find instructions on how to download and set up the NNTP Bridge here:
When will this Happen? Effective June 1, 2010 this newsgroup will be closed.
Where Should I go with the Closure of this Newsgroup? Microsoft has a large selection of forums, many of which cover either the same or closely related technologies to the ones found in the newsgroups. The forums have seen amazing growth and are an excellent place to continue the discussion. We recommend that you start with
Should you want to visit the other Microsoft Forums, please go to