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?

Summary Article Name Microsoft announces retirement of the TechNet Gallery (and all its scripts) Description Microsoft announced plans to retire the company's TechNet Gallery last week and delete all scripts, tools and guide published on the site. Author Martin Brinkmann Publisher Ghacks Technology News Logo

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