Opinion: MSDN documentation < useless

  • Thread starter Thread starter bonkers
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bonkers

OK, I'm new to the Visual Studio environment, but I have previous experience
in other languages.

Has anyone else found that the documentation is worse than useless?

Half the time, I can't find what I'm looking for. The other half, I COPY AND
PASTE code RIGHT FROM THE DOCUMENTATION into my app and I get messages like
"xxx is not a member of yyy"

What do you folks think? Any good books out there?
 
personally I found the documentation is really great and that's part of what
gives MS a big lead over the competition.

compare to UNIX man page or MacOSX 'easy to do it yourself' documentation,
MSDN is soooo good !

however, personally, I use VS.NET just to get win32 documentation.
for .NET I use the .NET doc. VS.NET has the same but it's somehow better
presented in the .NET SDK help.
for the compact framework I downloaded (somewhere, uh ....) a CFM file
highlighting the difference between the full SDK & the CF one ...
 
The documentation is for Studio, so there's a lot there that the CF doesn't
support. A better filter for CF stuff would be nice, but for content, it's
great.

-Chris
 
Hi,

People who follow this newsgroup will know that I'm usually very
critical when it concerns Microsoft, but I simply expect the number one
software vendor in the world to set the right example. Whereas everyone
else these days has to struggle for every penny, cutting corners left
and right, Microsoft certainly has the resource to do things "the right
way".

In that light, I consider the .NET CF a poor product. It's a subset of
what the Windows CE O.S. offers, and it currently lacks access to so
many O.S. features that the coding effort to get all that functionality
back, outweighs the gains you should get from using the new .NET
environment.

Also, even after the release of SP2, anyone can easily find at least ten
bugs within half a day. Why on earth the Microsoft QA/QC department
failed to find them is beyond comprehension.

Yet, when it comes to documentation, I actually think Microsoft did a
nice job. The only thing that would be even more helpful, is to include
the source code to the .NET objects, similar as to how Borland and Sun
supply the source code to their VCL and Swing library.

What better way to appreciate how things work than being able to look
inside the source code! That's why the OpenNet.CF library, which comes
with full source code, is such a God's send, it will contain working
examples for nearly everything you could possibly want to do, and even
more ;-)


Regards,

Elisa
 
I have never found any documentation more useful and available than MSDN.
The web MSDN search is wretched. Additional scattered thoughts are:

Better .NET CF filtering would be appreciated, as Chris noted.

".NET CF Limitations" should have a separate section. I have been annoyed
more than once when I bumped into something that worked in the full
framework, looks like it should work in the CF, but doesn't actually work.
But, as a product manager I would have been VERY hesitant to provide this as
a deliverable. PMs have lost their jobs for less.

I registered a previous complaint regarding the lack of detail regarding
..NET CF marshalling. Some excellent examples are available on MSDN, but a
section specifiying exactly what is and is not supported by the marshaller
would have been appreciated.

The SqlServerCE documentation is not up to the normal Microsoft standards.
I have submitted at least 7 bugs based on fairly obvious problems (ex. code
sample provided for SqlCEConnection.ConnectionString is/was wrong)

- K.
 
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