Use https instead of http for links whenever possible

[mairaw]

See https://twitter.com/Duncanma/status/968369013234569216 for background info

Anyone jumping on this issue should break the PR into multiple smaller PRs so we're not overwhelmed to review this. An example can be seen with PR #4506 that only contains the links in the F# folder.

[ChrisMaddock]

This sounded like a fun little scripting task. 😄

I started with the low-hanging fruit, and wrote a tool that changes the URL to https if and only if https is supported, and there's no redirection involved. I restricted it to just the docs/standard subdir, and still ended up with 245 changes across 162 files.

I did a check through those initial 245, and they looked good - but manually reviewing changes like this across the entire repository sounds like it would be an enormous task.

The code I wrote is currently under 100 lines. Would the docs team be interested instead in reviewing that code, and then accepting an automated PR covering a wider area of the repository instead? Or was the intention of this issue more to allow an easier contribution option for newcomers? Either is fine for me, I've got what I wanted out of it!

For reference: the docs/standard changes are here: master...ChrisMaddock:master. I won't PR them yet, due to size.

[BillWagner]

@ChrisMaddock Thanks for working on this. I like the process you've taken.

We do the same internally: reviewing script code, and then comparing output. If you can put the code in a gist, or somewhere else where it is publicly available, we'll review it, spot check the output, and then merge it.

Thanks again for the continued involvement.

[ChrisMaddock]

Great, thanks @BillWagner 😄

Wasn't expecting such a quick response - I'd like to tidy it up a little first, and am out of time for tonight. I'll come back to this in the next couple of days and put it in a PR. Thanks!

[BillWagner]

You happened to catch me online. 😸

[mairaw]

No rush @ChrisMaddock! Excellent way to approach this. My approach had some issues on the F# PR. 😢

It would be interesting to look at the ones that redirect on a later pass too.

[ChrisMaddock]

It would be interesting to look at the ones that redirect on a later pass too.

Absolutely! I wanted to keep this review-simple to start with however, given there's so many of them. 😄

I think the next pass I'd want to do would be to update all the fwlinks/msdn links that redirect to a docs.microsoft.com page - as I think that's a fairly large amount, and they would be nice to get sorted. That would of course involved working out the relative links etc

[ChrisMaddock]

I've just got back to this - but spotted #4789. Will hold off until after that's gone though. 😄