7 ms·

I'm not sure why the hate against MSDN - at least for .NET, I found the documentation to be one of the best in the business -even a decade ago. I'd only put Go'

• HideousKojima 5y ago
  MSDN isn't terrible, but for answers.microsoft.com 90% of questions are some outsourced foreign support rep telling the user to run sfc /scannow and not looking into the issue any further. Which makes it a huge pain for sysadmin type stuff, their developer documentation is much better.
  • zaat 5y ago
    answers.microsoft.com accepted answers are mostly accepted by the poor foreign support rep after OP have left disappointed. It is somewhat similar in quality to yahoo answers. Microsoft should be ashamed this pile of useless bits is public.
    • aksss 5y ago
      Let me make sure I understand the problem you're having trouble getting answers from answers.microsoft.com, is that correct? Please open the site answers.microsoft.com in Microsoft Edge web browser and once the page loads, look for answers there. This should solve the issue. Can you also please run the windows memory diagnostic tool and paste in the output in a reply to this message? Once you have done that, please open your computer and make sure that your CPU is firmly seated in its socket. That will be required to help further. If this has helped solve the problem finding answers on answers.microsoft.com please mark it as correct.
      • tdeck 5y ago
        This is excellent and very representative.
      • carlhjerpe 5y ago
        Please run "sfc /scannow" and dism /online /restore-health" to verify system integrity.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      > It is somewhat similar in quality to yahoo answers. “How is babby formed?" [EDIT] Corrected quote
      • sk5t 5y ago
        "How is babby formed" - for those not participating in the zeitgeist of 2006.
        • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
          Thanks for the correction. I actually missed the original.
  • Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
    Yeah that site is terrible. Spent a few days digging for solutions to fix an issue, always ended up back on that site. Always same old useless information. I had to go to like page 10 of Google results to find some random sysadmin's blog which looked like it came straight out of 2005 and guess what? Problem is explained clearly, steps to fix it are laid out, sorted and wish I found the website 2 days earlier.
  • m-p-3 5y ago
    That's why you don't go there, you go on ServerFault and SuperUser on StackExchange instead.
  • segfaultbuserr 5y ago
    > outsourced foreign support rep telling the user to run sfc /scannow Sysadmin story. Recently I had a really strange problem after a disk migration - defrag.exe simply would not run no matter what (I needed it to TRIM the SSD), it just quits without any messages, as if it's /bin/false. GUI had the same problem. The first search result was a thread at answers.microsoft.com, they give the same canned "sfc /scannow, dism /restorehealth, chkdsk /f" response. But OP finally solved the problem on their own, the "Optimize Drives" service was somehow been stopped, restarting it solved the problem. I tried it, it didn't work. Having no options, I decided to give the seemingly useless solution a shot (why did I bother to try? This was after a disk migration, I felt filesystem corruption could be real). It finally worked after "chkdsk /f"... I was genuinely impressed. It was the first time ever that it actually fixed a real problem for me. Presumably defrag.exe detected a filesystem anomaly and refused to run.
    • puppet-master 5y ago
      > defrag.exe simply would not run no matter what (I needed it to TRIM the SSD) Would be interested in the logic here, given that it runs counter to what I thought was extremely obvious advice by now. Defrag generates writes to rearrange blocks in the _virtual_ view of storage visible to the OS, but even after defragmentation, the _physical_ placement is totally outside the control of anything except the firmware. If after defragmentation a file's blocks are arranged (0, 1, 2, 3) in the OS-visible view, in flash are still very likely to to be arranged (412, 77, 1, 12341, 5) etc. All you can do is let it know that some range of sectors is not used, which is what TRIM enables, and that does not require defragmentation upfront.
      • segfaultbuserr 5y ago
        > All you can do is let it know that some range of sectors is not used, which is what TRIM enables, and that does not require defragmentation upfront. This is exactly what defrag.exe does on an SSD today. Since Windows 10 (or 8?), instead of doing a "real" defrag, defrag.exe also has an option to issue TRIM commands to unused blocks on an SSD. In other words, it works like fstrim(1). The time has changed and you must have missed the update. I suggest keeping your knowledge up-to-date before delivering a lecture on disk defragmentation on a forum where everyone should've known better. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/defrag https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati... > /d Perform traditional defrag (this is the default). > /l Perform retrim on the specified volumes. > /o Perform the proper optimization for each media type. Since I migrated the hard disk using a block-level copy via "dd", it's a good idea to manually TRIM the disk afterwards to inform the controller about the unused blocks in the new filesystem for proper wear leveling (to the controller, the block-level copy looks like a single large file). And before another one gives me another lecture: No, I did not corrupt the filesystem because I made the mistake of copying the disk while Windows was still in Fast Startup mode. It was probably ntfsresize(8), to be fair, the corruption was extremely minor.
• puppet-master 5y ago
  The actual MSDN docs sections are uniformly reasonable in my experience, but some galaxy brains decided to nest at least 2 (if not 3?) user support forums (think "my printer is broken") under the microsoft.com domain. Searching their docs usually requires a bunch of excludes
• Spooky23 5y ago
  I don’t work with Microsoft stuff as much anymore, but my big beefs with Microsoft product documentation are: - It is was often unclear what version of the “thing” was in scope. An article from product version X will reference X-1 documention. - Microsoft will gaslight you. If you interact with them on a significant issue, you need to snapshot their product docs. I’ve worked with Premier on issues when pushing products to the edge of their limits, and the product group will edit the product specs in near real-time.
  • trevorishere 5y ago
    Most Docs have public repos on GitHub, so you can see the PRs if the docs change.
  • tasogare 5y ago
    Microsoft is a complex and big entity. While most of it is doing a bad job whatever it is, some parts are quite good. In particular now that the C# stack is fully open, it's very easy to report a bug (on GitHub) and developers are reactive from my experience (submitted a bug impacting the dotnet SDK).
    • kiklion 5y ago
      I found the same. C# being on GitHub combined with the Microsoft documentation has made working with it a breeze. If I ever have any doubt, I just step into the code itself and figure it out.
    • Spooky23 5y ago
      Agreed. That issue left a sour taste in my mouth. As a customer, I don’t really need to be in the middle of corporate politics, I have my own poisonous politics to deal with! I share it because many folks can’t conceive that sort of thing being possible.
    • NicoJuicy 5y ago
      Even before that. A problem in EF, got fixed in 2 minor versions later. This was during .net 4.5 fyi, ages ago by now.
• hangonhn 5y ago
  MSDN and the whole ecosystem around it is a gem. MSFT isn't great at some (or even many) things but I've always felt MSFT really put a lot of effort into developer experience. I don't miss much about moving away from the MSFT orbit except for MSDN and their development tooling. I kind of got some of it back with Visual Studio Code but I still really miss the Visual Studio level of experience.
  • gjvc 5y ago
    this guy came to the same conclusion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE
  • pas 5y ago
    Well, PowerShell docs are next to useless. Maybe the other parts are better. But I think this mythos of great docs for proprietary MS stuff is just that, a myth.
    • fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
      Yeah, I’ve tried a handful of Microsoft products and MSFT’s docs are ok for tutorials, but I’ve often found it hard to find useful reference documentation: e.g. the tutorial bits of Appcenter’s Codepush and UI Testing documentation are ok, but the reference documentation for both is ambiguous and/or incomplete.
      • radicalbyte 5y ago
        With Microsoft, generally the documentation around the edges isn't great. The edges being the "Microsoft condoned solutions and generally anything coming from the Office/Enterprise side. On the Enterprise side they often have fantastic documentation but they have an amazing talent for making it unfindable. It's like they hire an army of noob-level interns who churn out "getting started" articles, with the end result being that you have to dig 5 pages deep into Google result to get meaningful documentation (4 of those pages are of people asking questions on Microsoft Connect or the-site-that-shall-not-be-named or something).
• mrweasel 5y ago
  Microsofts documentation is a mixed bag, but mostly rather good, if you know how to read it. An example of a place where it's bad is the Python API for Azure. I needed to call some service, I forget which, and everything was clearly just translated from C#. There's a function which takes a string as an input, except it doesn't, it takes one of three string, neither of which is mentioned. I assume that in C# it's an enum, and Visual Studio will just list the option for you.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Microsofts documentation is a mixed bag, but mostly rather good, if you know how to read it. “if you know how to read it” is...not a ringing endorsement of documentation. But, its true that MS documentation is less likely to be wrong once you understand what it is trying to say than, say, Amazon's (though have glaring omissions or things concealed by opaque organization is quite common.)
• danschuller 5y ago
  Links of MSDN pages seem like they have a life in weeks. They can be helpful to stumble across but never as a longer term reference.
• liversage 5y ago
  It's weird to read all the complaints about how bad https://msdn.microsoft.com/ https://msdn.microsoft.com/ is. For quite some time all the documentation including what was known as MSDN is now on https://docs.microsoft.com/ https://docs.microsoft.com/. While I'm sure the complaints are valid (or was in the MSDN days) I believe Microsoft is putting a lot of effort behind these pages. You can provide feedback on pages that will result in a GitHub issue being created. You can even make pull requests. While it's possible to provide feedback not all areas seem to process this feedback in a timely manner which of course is frustrating. However, the good parts (like .NET) are very good.
  • userbinator 5y ago
    MSDN was great, Docs is not. There are still lots of inexplicable errors from the migration of content, and they seem content to outsource the labour of finding and fixing them --- errors they themselves created --- to the "community".
  • initplus 5y ago
    This just isn’t the case. Docs for many older releases are still stuck behind a paywall on msdn, or even available offline only.
• habeebtc 5y ago
  Win32 and .Net docs are great! Azure and Powershell docs leave a lot to be desired. A lot of the time parameters are vaguely documented, return values completely undocumented. You have to inspect the object returned by a lot of things to get to understand what members and methods it has, and what they mean. Examples illustrating what formats it expects inputs in? Forget it.
  • userbinator 5y ago
    The newest stuff tends to have the worst docs, since they haven't had time to "mature" with corrections and such yet. In contrast, Win32 which has been around for over 25 years is mostly stable now.
  • p1necone 5y ago
    Azure powershell docs are the worst. All you get told is the name of fields, no indication of what they mean, or the expected inputs/outputs.
    • krylon 5y ago
      I assume you have not encountered SharePoint. The SharePoint documentation I could get my hands on - even in books I paid for - was so bad it was like I was living inside some David Lynch interpretation of Ancient Greek myths of divine punishments unleashed upon the worst sinners. More than once, the "solution" to my problem was a blog post by a SharePoint consultant from India describing some undocumented flag to pass to some obscure command, "but of course, you should never do this on a production system". (I bear no ill will towards Indian SharePoint consultants, to be clear. I just find it really creepy they seem to enjoy this kind of torment.)
      • vjust 5y ago
        This. Sharepoint has to be a beast to work with.
  • N00bN00b 5y ago
    PowerShell is easy to debug though. So I never have a problem with that. I generally program in it without ever looking at any documentation. I just don't need it. Just get-help -full/get-member everything or export-clixml it. But maybe I've done it for too long, so I don't see the weaknesses anymore.
• S_A_P 5y ago
  As far as OEM notes go ms is probably among the best but it’s not saying a lot. I find that most MS notes rarely explain the how very well if at all. They usually just explain the what. Sometimes that is enough, but usually I want to see examples of how to use code to perform a task. For me at least seeing examples of real world use helps infinitely more than here is an object. Here are its public methods. Here are its public fields and properties. Stack Overflow excels at showing implementation examples which, while the best way is not always highly rated, at least shows a way. When I was more junior I would sometimes take SO answers verbatim but I think now it at least gives me something to think about improving.
• Akronymus 5y ago
  It isn't a bad site per se. Just most links seem to be broken.
• kaba0 5y ago
  Just a note that Android Java is not JavaTM, it is just some bastard son of it. I think java has quite a good API documentation, it’s just that google results are usually from java 8 or even earlier versions.
• vjust 5y ago
  I might have been unfair on MSDN, as my experience in the past was really bad. I work with non-MS tech quite a bit, not sure if being deep in the MS-ecosystem helps in grokking the docs.. But I found it uniformly bad across : MS-SQL, Visual Basic, Asp.Net etc. I think my issue might be more with the English style. But why does SO work right-away for me, while other these other developer portals don't. Part of the flaw maybe lies with me - maybe these portals (like MSDN) need in-depth, patient reading (guilty here). SO on the other hand, is way quicker in helping to solve issues. Over the years though, I've had enough bad experiences .. Someone should do a compare between SO and non-SO. Take a sample, discrete (if such a thing exists in software issues) issue, and see how both help to solve. The layout of the page, the noise, and finally the curated/voted answer all contribute. And factor in the fact that SO answers are written by a diverse group of people, many of them non-English speaking. Call it hate, but regardless, Oracle product docs - when you're in a bind are the bottom of the pit.