So you got yourself a new Surface Dock for your Surface Book, Surface Pro 4 or Surface Pro 3.
Now you are happy to connect everything to your external screen(s) via your Mini Display Port Adapter which you connect to your Surface Dock.
And nothing works.
You take your adapter to your Surface, plug it in and suddenly your Monitor is working.
What is happening?
As it turns out, the Surface Dock can only be used with “active” Mini Displayport Adapters. Why don´t you communicate that Microsoft? It could at least be mentioned in the small manual of the dock…
I did not know that there is an active Version of those adapters, did you?
Be it as it is, your cheap Adapter that is working directly on the Surface will not work with your Surface Dock.
You can read about the difference between active and passive adapters here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/danchar/archive/2014/10/07/d.aspx
I have ordered two of those Delock adapters as they are still cheaper than Microsofts version.
I´ll update this post when the adapters arrived to tell you if the Surface dock can finally do it´s job.
Update: yes, the adapters do their job and so can the dock now 🙂
Source: Amazon review of Surface Dock (thank you!)