Sticky Notes To The Rescue

That's never going to happen, for several reasons. First, at least to my knowledge, that is illegal. Second, MSDN is huge and more important, it changes on regular basis. Third, what makes you think that all notes would actually be valuable and correct?

Back when the Internet was just starting to become popular some enterprising company came up with a background application t hat you could run on your computer and it interacted with browsers (or maybe just Internet Explorer) and let you put "sticky notes" on any website you wanted to, so that when you came back to that site you'd see the notes that you posted. More interestingly, anyone else who also ran that background application on their computer would see your notes on those web pages. It was touted as a way to share thoughts on the contents of web sites.

That product never really took off, but it does point out that the technology is possible. I maintain that it would be incredibly helpful for things like software library documentation, like MFC.

Now, is it legal to post "your own" copy of the MFC documentation, without permission from MFC? Probably not. But might it be legal to set up a web page that has a "sub-page" showing the MFC pages and some kind of border around it that has additional information on it (the sticky notes area)? I think so. Consider the fact that Yahoo does something quite similar when it shows the pages that match your search criteria. What appears "around" the web page is Yahoo stuff. Perhaps something similar could be done which allows sticky notes.

Would all the postings be correct and valuable? Probably as correct and valuable as the postings on dev-archive. Some are good, many are excellent, and a few are way off base. But overall it's an excellent source of information.

I think this sticky notes idea would add one more valuable resource to software engineers.