August 12, 2008
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More on MSDN
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1308 hit(s)
In the wake of my recent yackery about undocumentation on MSDN, Seth drew my attention to some comments on a mini-microsoft blog post. As usual, the comment threads, which are huge, veer far, far off topic. Interspersed among all the other sniping, the comment thread in question addresses the usefulness of documentation on MSDN.
This is the initial complaint:... the MSDN documentation continues to be so thunderingly useless. A 10-second Google search almost always finds blogs or articles far superior to the cruft in MSDN.
Another commenter joins the fray:MSDN is the sole reason why Open Source hasn't yet completely taken over as a development platform. They don't have proper documentation for stuff and we do, so when you develop something you KNOW you'll be able to figure things out quickly, either from MSDN or from people who have read MSDN and created their own samples (where else do you think they got their knowledge from?).
I could name quite a few things Microsoft puts out that are "useless", but MSDN is not among them.
There is some back-and-forth about MSDN, which mostly gets into the search capabilities of MSDN. Returning to content, someone who is probably a writer in the Developer Division observes:... when a single writer is responsible for maintaining 3500 pages of documentation, content will usually suck to one degree or another. Pick about 10 tech books on your shelf. That's the amount of text some writers are responsible for keeping up to date.
They'd love to write samples or dig into obscure failure modes of APIs, but just don't have the time.
This is answered by the now-familiar request to make documentation into a wiki:Which is why the MSDN folks need to transform the documentation into a moderated Wiki initially open to MVPs, UA, product groups and other credible folks.
How else to get meaningful how-to, scenario, code snippet, and in-the-trenches content on a regular basis?
To the extent that there is encouraging news here, it's that the complaints focus primarily on search (in this thread, anyway). You can see that the thesis of my earlier post is seconded by the presumptive writer who indicates the scope of coverage required to maintain the current doc set.
The wiki idea is, as noted, familiar. In fact, MSDN allows users to amend (tho not change) content. I hope that advocates of wikifying MSDN are taking full advantage of this feature, which has been available for ... lessee ... getting on two years now. See you there!
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