3 ms·

I'm dealing with Azure at work right now you would not believe how much of their API is undocumented or unexplained. My company is being courted by MS a bit, b

by hacknat 11y ago

I'm dealing with Azure at work right now you would not believe how much of their API is undocumented or unexplained. My company is being courted by MS a bit, because they want us on Azure, so I was able to talk to some of their developers on the phone when I hit roadblocks. The amount of things they admitted to me were undocumented was enormous.

douche 11y ago
That's pretty par for the course, I've found. I do a lot of work with Skype for Business/Lync, and besides it seeming like there's about fifty people in the world that regularly work with this stuff, the documentation tends to be a trainwreck. Thank goodness for Reflector and dotPeek.
frik 11y ago
Is any of this news? This company always hypes stuff that is years away or unfinished and buggy for years, there API documentation is deliberately incomplete to have an competitive advantage in case they want to change private API bits in front of their competition, etc. It was bad, it got better and now it is worse.
- toyg 11y ago
  To be fair, that's because the stuff they hype is invariably humongous. From win32 onwards, all their solutions involved inordinate amounts of libraries and features, pandering to absolutely everyone and his dog. No wonder they also had tons of undocumented nooks and crannies... All considered, MSDN has always had a huge amount of content, which was pruned only sporadically. It has long been the gold standard for technical docs; good luck finding that sort of detail for mainstream projects like KDE, Gnome, or even the Linux kernel.
  - frik 11y ago
    Fair? Is the truth uncomfortable? Yes. Deal with it. And this company was never fair, at any time, to anyone. With Steve's stint as CEO after a few years he got softer and that was the best era of the company and for everyone else. But the current CEO [edited] turned the ship to be pretty end-user hostile (forced monthly updates on recent products, spying on user), the crude bribing of enterprise CTOs and their products are buggier and less documented then ever before. Devs run away, mobile market share is <1%. The trust is gone.
    - toyg 11y ago
      Holy crap, dude, calm down. "India-born Bill 2.0 from a high caste", really? I hope someone flags it. I may or may not agree with some of your points, but there is no need to pepper your argument with gratuitous racism. MS has always been an aggressive company doing some bad things. I'm far from a MS apologist (where were you in 2000? I was in a social squat learning about Linux...), but I'm old enough to give props where props are due regardless of my "religious beliefs". MS docs are still way better than Oracle docs, to mention but one "bad" corp doing "bad" things. That's all there is.
      - jasonm23 11y ago
        Not sure they were being racist, you seem to trigger a bit prematurely. If the CEO happened to be of Bavarian Aristocratic heritage, would pointing that out be racist? Satya Nadella is of the Brahmin caste, there is not one thing racist in noting it.

by hacknat 11y ago

douche 11y ago

That's pretty par for the course, I've found. I do a lot of work with Skype for Business/Lync, and besides it seeming like there's about fifty people in the world that regularly work with this stuff, the documentation tends to be a trainwreck. Thank goodness for Reflector and dotPeek.

frik 11y ago

Is any of this news? This company always hypes stuff that is years away or unfinished and buggy for years, there API documentation is deliberately incomplete to have an competitive advantage in case they want to change private API bits in front of their competition, etc. It was bad, it got better and now it is worse.

toyg 11y ago
To be fair, that's because the stuff they hype is invariably humongous. From win32 onwards, all their solutions involved inordinate amounts of libraries and features, pandering to absolutely everyone and his dog. No wonder they also had tons of undocumented nooks and crannies... All considered, MSDN has always had a huge amount of content, which was pruned only sporadically. It has long been the gold standard for technical docs; good luck finding that sort of detail for mainstream projects like KDE, Gnome, or even the Linux kernel.
- frik 11y ago
  Fair? Is the truth uncomfortable? Yes. Deal with it. And this company was never fair, at any time, to anyone. With Steve's stint as CEO after a few years he got softer and that was the best era of the company and for everyone else. But the current CEO [edited] turned the ship to be pretty end-user hostile (forced monthly updates on recent products, spying on user), the crude bribing of enterprise CTOs and their products are buggier and less documented then ever before. Devs run away, mobile market share is <1%. The trust is gone.
  - toyg 11y ago
    Holy crap, dude, calm down. "India-born Bill 2.0 from a high caste", really? I hope someone flags it. I may or may not agree with some of your points, but there is no need to pepper your argument with gratuitous racism. MS has always been an aggressive company doing some bad things. I'm far from a MS apologist (where were you in 2000? I was in a social squat learning about Linux...), but I'm old enough to give props where props are due regardless of my "religious beliefs". MS docs are still way better than Oracle docs, to mention but one "bad" corp doing "bad" things. That's all there is.
    - jasonm23 11y ago
      Not sure they were being racist, you seem to trigger a bit prematurely. If the CEO happened to be of Bavarian Aristocratic heritage, would pointing that out be racist? Satya Nadella is of the Brahmin caste, there is not one thing racist in noting it.