Microsoft announces retirement of the TechNet Gallery (and all its scripts)
Microsoft announced plans to retire the company's TechNet Gallery last week. TechNet Gallery was a community-powered website that allowed members to share scripts, tools, and guides for use with Microsoft products and services.
Microsoft revealed that TechNet Gallery hosts over 25,000 contributions from community members and MVPs currently, and that all of these contributions will be deleted.
The company set the entire TechNet Gallery site to read-only mode recently and plans to redirect the entire site to the Microsoft Docs Samples Browser page.
Microsoft recommends that owners of resources that are hosted on the TechNet Gallery website should migrate these "to a GitHub project if it is a tool, script, or utility". For technical documentations and guides, Microsoft suggests to "re-host it on a website" so that people who find it useful may contact the owner of the document.
Existing projects won't be archived on GitHub which means that creators are on their own when it comes to migration and ensuring that the content remains available online.
Microsoft started to move or delete MSDN and TechNet content previously, and the company notes that the retirement of the TechNet Code Gallery is another step in the company's plan to retire older content.
The following reasons are provided by Microsoft:
- GitHub is a better place to host open source code and tools.
- Social media and tech blogs have become the primary way for people to host and share tips and tools.
- MSDN and TechNet content has already been migrated to the Microsoft Docs website.
- Most content is not very popular anymore on the TechNet Gallery website.
Microsoft plans to delete all content in June 2020 and redirect the entire page to the Docs website. Content owners have until June 2020 to back up projects and migrate them to other services.
Closing Words
Microsoft's purge attempts continue. We have linked to the TechNet Gallery several times throughout the years and it is sad to see such a resource go without backup. It is possible that the Internet Archive will pick up the scripts before Microsoft pulls the plug in June 2020. A quick check shows several popular downloads, many with over 100,000 downloads on the site.
Now You: Have you used resources in the past that Microsoft deleted or plans to delete?
Well, considering today I just downloaded a very useful script that allowed me to gather the Window licenses keys from all my workstations remotely, saving me *hours* over having to do that one by one, I can’t help but wonder what other great stuff is on there that I will lose access to, things that might be similarly useful in the future that I will find have been purged because they can’t be bothered to just leave well enough alone and let the site stay.
What gets me is that I’m sure it costs them next to *nothing* to continue to host this site. It makes no sense at all that they keep purging legacy information that still comes in handy. Their documentation sites have been repeatedly removed and links to useful information about troubleshooting specific issues that still arise in Windows and other MS software are just dead.
Congratulation Microsoft.
Perfect Timing and consequent doing during Corona where everyone works from home and needs to setup certain things. Since your marvelous foresight you cant comment and exychange information anymore for scripts / samples desperately needed. So once again thank you Microsoft for just being lame.
took longer than I expected, when actual technet was cancelled (just after I spent couple hundred renewing and I lost 4 months no payback) knew msdn was gonna follow.
even most of their server 2012r2 and 2012r2 essentials technet docs are moved to an archive with NO hotlinking off links that even viewer gives you.
real pain in the ass for those that dig into active directory/etc and don’t just google a fix and rather want to understand why fix needed.
grr no edit allowed.
should read EVENT viewer not even viewer
MS started using Linus Torvalds GIT system about 2013 “as its distributed source-code-control platform.” In 2017 it was reported that MS had ported ALL of its Windows code to GIT and its own open source Git Virtual File System (GVFS), about 300GB of files. The benefits for MS’s engineers were immediate.
GitHub is owned by MS (purchased 2018). Normally, I’m a critic of MS. However, given MS’s success with GIT/GVFS it might actually turn out to be for the best. The useless stuff will get dropped and everything else get ported. I’ll take a “wait and see” on this one.
see…
Microsoft uses open-source software to create Windows (Steven Vaughan-Nichols – 2017)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-uses-open-source-software-to-create-windows/
They’re doing the best they can for someone that is not communicating in their native language. Perhaps you should learn Hindi, so you can explain to them how to improve their tech skills.
perhaps a support system could be setup so people speak to a tech in their native language?
eg english speaks to an english speking person, german speaks to a german speaking tech, someone from india speks to a tech from india, etc…
nah that would be racist or something amirite???
So, when will they be getting rid of Windows? They seem to be intent on vanishing everything else that helped build Microsoft into… Microsoft.
So they replace it with a inferior site? No RSS? Typical Microsoft.
Technet Gallery isn’t used by the majorly of developers anyway, is an oudated resource superseeded by Microsoft Docs.
The majorly of information and scrips available on the Gallery are outdated.
This is a disaster!
What will all the Microsoft tech support reps from India with no actual knowledge of the products they are trying to support do when they google a solution and then find a broken TechNet link?
Not that it will really matter since these reps rarely understand the actual question in the first place, nor do they ever seem to read the entire problem description. But now they won’t be able to post a “quick fix” and then immediately close the still unresolved ticket.
dont be a racist b…rd U are having an Indian who has propelled MSFT to new heights and one more indian as Alphabet CEO. This shows your uprbringing….can’t blame you alone
Actually, it’s called the truth.
@testbed
Don’t be a Microsoft shill. Windows 10 is still a joke, this indian you talk about may have propelled Microsoft in terms of annual revenue, but for the average Joe this doesn’t jack sh*t.
Windows 10 has been horrible from the start. Windows 10 was invasive in how it wanted to install itself on top of Windows 7 or 8.
There was a news article of a businessman in 2015 who was having a conference call with a customer, when his laptop suddenly began updating to Windows 10 and restarted without his consent and no matter what he tried to do could stop the install and as a result he lost a lot of money.
Not to mention all the crap that runs in the background in Windows 10 that people never use. All the UWP crap apps run in the background even if you disable them. The Windows Defender Antivirus is invasive and intrusive, it’s hard to disable and can’t be uninstalled by conventional means. Edge always runs in the background even if I never opened it on a fresh install.
These are a few things that make Windows 10 horrible and how your hero Nutella-Man – The Human Nutella has done absolutely nothing to remedy this and make Windows 10 a more pleasant experience. All he cares about is how to make more money for Microsoft, which is mostly Azure, Cloud and cross-platform apps.
+1 Weilan
Regardless of his nationality, the current Microsoft CEO is the absolute worst. He is the one with “mobile first, cloud first”. Nothing good came out of this but inferior products in perpetual beta phases.
As for Alphabet/Google I don’t know how much say the CEO had in how things would turn out eventually, but now Google search is borderline unusable, full of censorship, and providing among the least relevant results.
Stackoverflow is what anyone uses anyway. Most Microsoft-hosted places like TechNet Gallery are second-rate frustration zones.
Maybe for you. Stack is a newb playground for code bros to copy paste from imo.
Well this is basically awful. There are lots of Powershell and batch scripts that I’ve used from here over the years.
The majority of these aren’t going to be migrated to other Microsoft sites, and any old links will break.
>Social media and tech blogs have become the primary way for people to host and share tips and tools.
Really? Social media? Something tells me that following whatever you’d find on twitter or facebook will end up with a computer exploding in your face. 0/10 would not recommend
Or maybe they refer to those youtube videos where someone types in notepad at 20-ish wpm with poor spelling and all. What a great source of computer tips. . .
Yeah, that is nonsense.