Microsoft Fixing MSDN Download Issues After Windows Azure Switch

Microsoft is working to fix issues that MSDN subscribers came across when downloading software from the company’s dev portal.

The software giant confirmed officially that users with MSDN subscriptions were having problems getting the products listed on the site.

It appears that poor download performance was a top MSDN subscriber complaint, but it wasn’t the only one.

“We are actively investigating intermittent reports of slow download speeds and some files not completing their full download size in some parts of the world. We made changes to the network [on September 6] and expect to make more [on September 7],” Microsoft’s Mark Curphey said yesterday.

“We will be updating the @msdn twitter account with updates as they happen and our support folks are helping users in the MSDN Subscriptions forum. Our apologies. We are actively working to get everything running and back to normal as soon as possible.”

Via its Twitter account, the MSDN team managed to keep users up to date on the measures it was taking in order to resolve download issues.

A number of fixes were implemented, and the MSDN download experience improved, according to some reports.

The last tweet from the software giant indicated that although some fixes had already improved MSDN downloads, additional changes were planned to better the experience still.

In August 2011, Microsoft migrated all MSDN and TechNet download items to Windows Azure, in an effort to remove the old download manager and cut down the time that subscribers needed to wait for their downloads to be delivered.

“All 15,000+ products that are available to all MSDN and TechNet subscribers can now be downloaded directly from inside of your browser with no additional software needed from our shiny new Azure Edge Content Network based download system,” Curphey said at the time.

“We used to serve up files from 3 global data centers but are now able to take advantage of over 24 global nodes! That means faster downloads for almost everyone around the world and for the vast majority of subscribers we know this will be a significant improvement.”