So let’s start the journey to understand the MSDN simply with a review of their MSDN Flash newsletter. A good way to keep up on the ever changing content of the MSDN is to subscribe to the MSDN Flash Newsletter.
Directly from their site…
MSDN Flash delivers critical developer news to you in one information-dense, compact newsletter. Stay up to date with the latest development news from Microsoft by subscribing today. Learn about the latest resources, SDKs, downloads, partner offers, security news, and national and local developer events. Every other week you'll get an e-mail containing pointers to all of the new articles, samples, and headlines from MSDN Online, the MSDN Library, the Knowledge Base, the Developer Centers, and other Microsoft Web sites. In addition, look for announcements of Microsoft and industry events, training opportunities, chats, and webcasts. 
It’s a newsletter that conforms to what you want to see, allowing you to add or remove topics of interest to you. New subscribers are taken through a series of questions that help you mold the newsletter to give you the information you want to see. If you’re a current subscriber, they recommend reviewing your choices periodically to keep the newsletter current for our ever-changing interests and jobs.
Subscribing will also get you some additional content not available in the ‘online’ version of the newsletter. Each email edition contains an editorial from one of several regionally chosen guest editors who take turns providing pointers to great MSDN content, free downloads, mash ups, or other fun things. The editors are usually regional evangelists, which works to your advantage since they are familiar with things in your area and also are people you can see and talk to if you attend their events.
Now for the downsides of the newsletter. First it’s regionally based and while this is a good thing, sometimes you need to see information from several regions. It’d be great if you could select several regions or no-region and get everything (I need to try that out, maybe you can). Second, it’s just a newsletter. No matter how hard they try they’ll never get everything in there. MSDN is a huge, very large, lots of content, extremely big (you get the picture) site with a lot of data in it. It is not humanly (or even machinely - is that a word?) possible to grind all that content down into something you can read over a cup of coffee while chestnuts roast on the fire. However, it’s a good place to start learning about the MSDN and meet some of the people involved with it.
I am also a little disappointed in the frequency of the newsletters. With the amount of content on MSDN and the number of evangelists that Microsoft employees you’d think they’d be able to push this out more frequently. I would enjoy getting this newsletter once a week or more. Maybe with the improved MSDN site things will be more intuitive. Only time will tell.
Well that’s all for now. Thanks for joining me. I enjoyed the coffee (a chilled German roast over ice with French vanilla and cream). See you next time.
Enjoy the Weekend!