You should have kept looking at the MSDN and TechNet, because the idea that there's no documentation because it has been forgotten, or indeed the idea that there is no documentation, is utter nonsense.
Windows Server 2012 Command-line reference:
* https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc754340(v=ws.11...
Windows XP A-Z Command-line reference, that is actually named that:
* https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb490890.aspx
Doco for the wdsutil and md commands, picked at random:
* https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc771206(v=ws.11...
* https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc754711(v=ws.11...
bcdedit command references:
* https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc731662(v=ws.11...
* https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ff542205(VS.85).asp...
And so forth. There's a huge amount of doco, including reference doco.
Re:The Rule of Silence (2006)
by emodendroket on Tuesday December 13, 2016 @09:22AM
(#13166933)
This perspective sounds a bit out-of-date when you consider how heavily they're pushing to get PowerShell into sysadmins' workflow. The online MSDN docs are also often pretty good.
Microsoft forgot (and still forget) the documentation for Windows - if you want a nice A-Z reference for the bootloader, or kernel, or shell or IIS's configuration file or half the command-line tools, you're usually out of luck. The official place is often an inaccessible, badly-written knowledgebase article written from a task-based, usually GUI-based perspective.
It never mattered that they'd implemented a more coherent system full of better ideas, because the only way they'd tell you about it is through the GUI.
The MSDN CDs from 20 years ago were really good for a complete programmer's reference, but 1) I'm not sure how well they kept that up and 2) I could never find anything as comprehensive for sysadmins.