Looks like the upcoming Orcas release of visual studio will have a new documentation format.  Why?  Well let me quote: "This new documentation presentation layer targets developer audience who need to find information quickly and easily in our documentation that grows significantly with every Visual Studio/.NET Framework release."

If you've ever spent more than 3.75 secs looking for information in the 2005 MSDN Library help system looking for anything more esoteric than the syntax for an if statement can be frustrating.

What's even better is that this search "if statement c#" doesn't even return a relevant result the if-else statement in the top 5 results - it's the 8th on the list!!  Below the top 3 ranked results of "lock statement (C#)", "using statement (C#)" and "fixed Statement (C#)".  Any improvement will be of value after that little effort!

My concern though, is that the changes listed for the MSDN documentation don't seem to address the real problem.  The changes are about disk space, screen scrolling and views, and filtering and restricting search contexts.  They don't seem to have realised that filtering doesn't improve relevancy, it just hides the problem.  I'll wait and see how the beta's look, but at this stage I'm not that hopeful of any greatly improved usefulness - google will probably stay as the main source of MSDN docs for now.

By the way the first 5 results for "if statement c#" on Google are all about the if statement - including the MSDN documentation entry for the if-else statement.