Whats in a BOL link?
In using BOLyou will have noticed that the links in BOL
contain some lovely guids. I often want to reference BOL in documents, forum
posts etc but was concerned that the guids might change. So I asked Alan Brewer
whether they change or not. He gave me a great response which I've got his
permission to publish here.
"There are two issues with GUID reliability, both should
be solid.
First,
when I asked a year ago, the MSDN publishing teams said they plan to keep
supporting both GUID-based and asset ID-based URL forms.
Second, in
our authoring system, once a topic is created it retains the same GUID across
releases. This is independent of where in any TOC the topic is surfaced. So all
SQL Server 2005 topics that still exist in SQL Server 2008 have the same GUID in
both environments. We started this policy when we forked the SQL Server 2008 BOL
source from the SQL Server 2005 BOL, so does not apply back to the SQL Server
2000 BOL. We plan to carry it forward to future releases.
MSDN/TechNet support many different formats of URLs, including
URLs with version identifiers. These URLs take you to the SQL 2005 and SQL 2008
versions of a topic shared between the two BOLs, even though the topic is at
different locations in the two different TOC's:
SQL Server
2005
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189084.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189084(SQL.90).aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/82d7819c-b801-4309-a849-baa63083e83f.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/82d7819c-b801-4309-a849-baa63083e83f(SQL.90).aspx
SQL Server
2008
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189084(SQL.100).aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/82d7819c-b801-4309-a849-baa63083e83f(SQL.100).aspx
If you
include the (SQL.90) or (SQL.100) version identifier in the URL you are taken to
the specific version's copy of the topic. If you do not include the version
identifier, you are taken to the copy of the topic in whatever is considered the
most current shipping version of the product. Today that is SQL Server 2005. As
part of the SQL Server 2008 RTM process (and I mean the real RTM, not the
"launch"), MSDN/TechNet will flip a switch so the SQL 2008 BOL becomes the one
you get with URLs that don't have a version
identifier."
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