4 ms·

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 develo

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).
- omnicognate 5y ago
  They're not as good as they were. The win32 docs are a a thing of beauty. I used to actively enjoy writing win32 code, in stark contrast to my experiences with Core Audio which is a similar sort of C API but documented by Apple, which is to say not at all. It is hell on earth. Powershell, though. I don't know how you could even document powershell. It's insane.
  - andix 5y ago
    I learned a lot of different programming languages. But I’ve never seen something as cryptic as power shell. Sometimes I write the same script as PS and as bash script. For PS I usually need 3x more characters than for bash. There are some features though that are really useful. But most of the time you won’t know about them when you need them.
    - zaphar 5y ago
      Character count is not generally a good measure of the quality here. I think the biggest issues aren't the verbosity but how complex it can be to express some of the most common operations. Filter is harder than it should be[0]. Same thing for map [0]: https://www.concurrency.com/blog/august-2018/powershell-basics-filtering-and-selecting https://www.concurrency.com/blog/august-2018/powershell-basi...
    - jiggawatts 5y ago
      > Sometimes I write the same script as PS and as bash script. That's your mistake! Don't write bash scripts in PowerShell, and don't write PowerShell scripts in bash. Don't be surprised if the shopkeeper can't understand you, when you're speaking "French" by translating an English sentence word for word. PowerShell is much more readable, terse, and elegant than Bash. It absolutely blows it out of the water... on Windows, where its inputs are the streams of objects that it's designed for. If you're trying to shoehorn text-based streams like in Linux into a PowerShell script, you're going to have a bad time. See this earlier comment I made and the linked comments for some examples of PowerShell-vs-Bash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423650

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).
omnicognate 5y ago
They're not as good as they were. The win32 docs are a a thing of beauty. I used to actively enjoy writing win32 code, in stark contrast to my experiences with Core Audio which is a similar sort of C API but documented by Apple, which is to say not at all. It is hell on earth. Powershell, though. I don't know how you could even document powershell. It's insane.
- andix 5y ago
  I learned a lot of different programming languages. But I’ve never seen something as cryptic as power shell. Sometimes I write the same script as PS and as bash script. For PS I usually need 3x more characters than for bash. There are some features though that are really useful. But most of the time you won’t know about them when you need them.
  - zaphar 5y ago
    Character count is not generally a good measure of the quality here. I think the biggest issues aren't the verbosity but how complex it can be to express some of the most common operations. Filter is harder than it should be[0]. Same thing for map [0]: https://www.concurrency.com/blog/august-2018/powershell-basics-filtering-and-selecting https://www.concurrency.com/blog/august-2018/powershell-basi...
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    > Sometimes I write the same script as PS and as bash script. That's your mistake! Don't write bash scripts in PowerShell, and don't write PowerShell scripts in bash. Don't be surprised if the shopkeeper can't understand you, when you're speaking "French" by translating an English sentence word for word. PowerShell is much more readable, terse, and elegant than Bash. It absolutely blows it out of the water... on Windows, where its inputs are the streams of objects that it's designed for. If you're trying to shoehorn text-based streams like in Linux into a PowerShell script, you're going to have a bad time. See this earlier comment I made and the linked comments for some examples of PowerShell-vs-Bash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423650