4 ms·
"No, they've had lot's of documentation. That's not the same thing. " This kind of snotty reply is always interesting. I've been a professional developer for 2
by defaultname 5y ago
"No, they've had lot's of documentation. That's not the same thing. "
This kind of snotty reply is always interesting. I've been a professional developer for 25 years. For most of those years I was deep in the Microsoft platform. C++, Win32 API, DirectX, COM+/DCOM, OLE, automation, C# / .NET.
For decades they've had exhaustive narrative documentation that would give huge backgrounders on everything. Architectural "how it fits" documentation with wonderful diagrams, hierarchies, etc. I could easily find anything and jump to specific APIs. Shitloads of examples. They clearly have had a great documentation focus for a long, long time. Something like the MSDN Library was years before its time.
Let me repeat, probably with way more experience in saying this, that Microsoft has done documentation well for years, and I seldom felt deprived (aside from occasionally when they do a restructure and search engines/links go to obsolete links). It is specifically in contrast to Microsoft's long excellent documentation that I find Apple's to be a sad joke.
There is some bizarre tendency in here for people to pretend that everything Microsoft does well they've only done well for most recent history, as if this is some sort of odd proselytizing and naysayers should realize that everything has changed.
- throwaway894345 5y ago> This kind of snotty reply is always interesting. I've been a professional developer for 25 years. I didn't interpret it as "snotty" (not beyond the norm for this forum, anyway). Could have been worded better, but charitable interpretation is an HN guideline. > There is some bizarre tendency in here for people to pretend that everything Microsoft does well they've only done well for most recent history, as if this is some sort of odd proselytizing and naysayers should realize that everything has changed. Or perhaps the parent just disagrees with you on merit and there is no nefarious underlying motive? In my experience at least, Microsoft's ethos and behavior has improved significantly in the last ~decade with respect to openness, developer friendliness, attitude toward open source, product quality, etc. It seems clear to me that there is some broad cultural change at MS and it seems plausible that it could affect documentation quality as well. Personally, I don't have a dog in this documentation fight, but your comment seems unjustifiably angry.
- defaultname 5y agoIt isn't that it's nefarious but rather that people who adopted Microsoft late rationalize that the company has a maligned history (some deserved, some not) by declaring that everything is different now. This appears in conversation after conversation where some current Microsoft enthusiast declares that everything was crap, but now it's wonderful. But a lot of things were already very good to excellent. I mean, one of the things you mentioned was developer friendliness yet the company has forever had industry leading developer relations. They've always had great documentation (there are going to be some developers who will still struggle and fail, but that isn't the fault of the documentation which can only drag them so far). SQL Server has been a great product for literally decades. NT was actually a great OS for the era and vis-a-vis its contemporaries. Microsoft has always been very "open" in fields where they are struggling. And on and on. They did a lot of great things in the past along with bad things. And right now they're doing great things along with bad things. Every org is a mixed bag.
- p_l 5y agoarguably it's been the last decade that documentation from MS suffered, specifically around the time that their software stopped shipping with CHM&co files and started opening web pages. But they are quite actively rebuilding from the switchover. I still miss CHM.
- throwaway2037 5y agoThe last sentence is a real gem. Zero trolling / Real question: What do you miss about CHM? My guess: It's a single package you can easily share and doesn't break once deployed (like a live website). :)
- p_l 5y agoIt was also fast, used quite minimal amount of resources even when there was a lot of diagrams included. Did I mention fast? Sure, generating an index could take a while - on PIO3/PIO4 drive with 486. N.B. The first time I've read Time Management for System Administrators, it was CHM file I just copied onto my free (won in competition) Windows Mobile PDA.
- lallysingh 5y agoNope. They've always had a lot of documentation. It's often been crap. I've been developing for MS platforms off and on since Win3.1, and have constantly dealt with cycles of "knowing API function A requires you understand what an X is, linked to function B, which only discusses X in terms of function A.". They write a lot, but it's not good. It's like a Hollywood western set where your at just the fronts of buildings. Lots of them, no depth. You always have to get a 3rd party book to figure this crap out... if you can find one. And if you're off and on, then you're constantly playing this game every few years. Frankly the X11 books out of O'Reilly are my standard for "good."
- eropple 5y agoI don't agree with this at all. I spent a solid decade doing predominantly Windows development and I haven't felt the need to buy a book on any Microsoft topic since, like - "learn Visual Basic 5". While they probably had a good stretch of years from like after VS2008 until maybe after VS2015 where the documentation was clearly not a focus, I've never had any trouble learning first-and-foremost from the documentation and have often used MSDN as a good example of not needing to already understand the entire topic to benefit from first-party documentation on that topic.
- fortran77 5y ago> This kind of snotty reply is always interesting It’s a typical HN Apple Zealot tactic. They simply lie to boost their cult.