About Microsoft Docs X-Ray
X-ray vision for people who want to know what changed—not only what the documentation says today.
Why it exists
Microsoft Learn pages evolve every day. Guidance is clarified, previews become generally available, screenshots change, and recommendations are rewritten. Once a page is updated, the previous wording is easy to miss unless you already know where its source lives and how to read Git history.
I built Microsoft Docs X-Ray to give everyone X-ray vision into that history. If you can add one letter to a domain, you can look beneath the published page, reveal the latest change, and decide whether it matters to you.
How it works
Docs X-Ray translates a supported documentation URL into its public GitHub repository and Markdown or MDX path. Reviewed product mappings—including Aspire—resolve immediately. Other Learn articles use a small same-origin edge function to read the page’s public Edit source metadata, restricted to repositories in the MicrosoftDocs organization.
Your browser then asks GitHub for the file’s commit timeline, downloads the selected revisions, sanitizes the rendered content, and builds readable visual and source diffs. The edge function does not receive the GitHub history, revisions, diff, or optional token.
Build and share a diff URL
For a Microsoft Learn article, keep its complete path and query string, but replace https://learn.microsoft.com with https://microsoftx.com. The resulting address opens the latest comparison and can be sent directly to anyone.
Share an exact comparison
To make sure everyone sees the same revisions, open the diff, select the versions you want, and use the Copy link to this view button in the Versions panel. Docs X-Ray adds the revision parameters to the URL automatically.
_mx_headselects the later commit; by itself, it compares that commit with its first parent._mx_baseselects the earlier commit when comparing two exact revisions._mx_view=markdownopens the source diff instead of the visual diff.
Share documentation outside Microsoft Learn
For a reviewed site such as Aspire, pass the encoded documentation URL through the url query parameter. The simplest method is to paste the original address on the home page, load the diff, and copy the resulting Docs X-Ray address.
Made for the community
This is an independent project for administrators, architects, developers, writers, and curious people who notice small documentation changes and want to understand why they matter.
Microsoft Docs X-Ray is not a Microsoft product or service. The original documentation site remains canonical, and every diff links back to the original page and public repository evidence.
If a mapping is missing or wrong, open an issue on GitHub. Clear examples and community contributions are welcome.
Built by Merill
Merill Fernando
Merill builds community tools and writes about Microsoft Entra and Microsoft 365. Microsoft Docs X-Ray grew from the page-diff explorer in Daily.Entra.News.
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