One of the great things about working for a print publication like MSDN Magazine is the sense of permanence that the printed word provides. Sure, there are fringe benefits—the trade show groupies and expensive vacation junkets paid for by advertisers are great—but at the end of the day, once something appears in print most people consider it "official" in a way that a Web site can never replicate.

Of course, the impermanence of online content provides some benefits that we don't get in a print vehicle. For instance, if an online article has a bug or needs a typo fixed, the site master can just dive into the page, fix what's broken, and within five minutes no trace of the problem remains. Not so with print, and our policy has always been that the MSDN Magazine Web site is an exact replica of the printed magazine. Even if an article is out of date, we leave it on the site for archival purposes.

Over time, we've come to the realization that however well-intentioned this policy was, it could potentially lead to magazine content providing less-than-optimal guidance to our online readers. We've worked to create a sensible update policy that would maintain the integrity of the original article while fixing any sections that could lead to unexpected problems. Through this process, the MSDN Magazine Corrections Page was born.

There are several types of updates that might need to be applied to articles. The most common are fixes for outdated information, incorrect statements, and security updates. For instance, in 2001 we ran a great article about ActiveX interop using the .NET Framework Beta 1. It was a well-written piece that did a great job of explaining the topic. The problem, however, was that the features didn't make it into the final release of the Framework version 1.0!

With our updated corrections policy, we note that the article contains outdated information on the updates page, and then provide a warning at the top of the article, plus pointers to newer MSDN Library content that will help you solve the problem that this article originally addressed. With that fix, we've saved dozens of developers a support call. In addition, we hope we're saving developers the time they might have spent searching for a feature in the Framework that ultimately wasn't included in their version.

As we learn more about the right ways to write hack-resistant applications, many techniques that were formerly part of a product's documentation are now understood to be security holes. The most common example is a database connection call that uses the sa account with a blank password. Everyone's done this in the past, right? We are working to remove these instances from our back issues content and noting exactly why we are doing this with each instance.

There is little question that our editors and authors are the tops in the industry. We put each article through extensive review, but once in a while a nagging little error can inadvertently creep into a piece. If we catch one, we will correct it online and clearly note the change so that you don't have to rely upon blind luck to find a fix that's been slipstreamed into our content.

We invite you to visit our online corrections page frequently at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/correct.aspx. If you can't remember that URL, we also offer it as a menu choice from our homepage. If you find what you think is a problem with an article, please contact the MSDN Magazine Ombudsman at mmombud@microsoft.com.

It's not enough to produce zero-defect articles for our readers. We are committed to maintaining the quality of all our content, both in print and online. And if you want to reward us with an expensive vacation junket, you've got our e-mail address!

Thanks to the following Microsoft technical experts: Scott Berry, Brandon Bray, Christopher Brumme, Simon Calvert, Felix Cheung, Scott Currie, Nick Hodapp, Anson Horton, Rob Howard, Polita Huff, Christopher Jones, Ronald Laeremans, Gerrard Lindsay, Enzo Lombardi, Duncan Mackenzie, Scott Nonnenberg, Joel Pobar, Grant Richins, Jay Roxe, Scott Seely, Herb Sutter, Dan Vallejo, and Feng Yuan.