Microsoft Webcasts are a great learning tool. They bring the power of in-person presentations to everyone with an Internet connection. Many of the Webcasts are highly technically oriented and include lots of demos right inside the Visual Studio.

However, not everything is perfect. Here’s the list of things I think can (and should) be improved:

• Search is inconsistent in behavior, look and feel from the rest of Microsoft’s sites and it is generally broken (returns no or a lot of useless results)
• The way to reach the archived webcast download is not always the same – sometimes you go through one, two or three screens
• Some of the webcasts provide ability to automatically add a reminder to your Outlook Calendar (great!) but some don’t
• Some of the archived webcasts are available as Live Meeting replays, some as Windows Media files, some as both and some as pure streaming Windows Media only – confusing, inconsistent and sometimes just plain irritating
• Archived content varies significantly in video quality (audio is generally consistently OK, low quality but audible) – this is my biggest complaint; I assume that Microsoft is aiming for the lowest common denominator (dial-up connections) but why not provide bigger and higher quality recording for the rest of us?
• On the plus side there is an RSS feed, but it’s all-or-nothing; since there are several categories of webcasts clearly separated by the interest groups, why not have separate RSS feeds for each (for example, I would be only interested in developer oriented ones)