https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-companion-for-swiftui/id1485...

No affiliation. It's sad and a bit pathetic that trillion dollar company can't hire even one person to work on public documentation.

While the level of documentation that exists is usually pretty good, the sad fact is that most documentation doesn’t exist, and it’s entirely due to the fact that they are handled by developers/documentors separately. If you had developers documenting in-situ in the code, instead of WWDC slides, then it would be a lot better.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.string.su...

The MS docs from the late '90s through about 2015 were stellar. For example, look at the Windows Sockets docs[1], which came out of that era. Here you see information architects working at the height of their power: Content is broken up into conceptual ("About Winsock"), task-based ("Using Winsock"), and reference ("Winsock Reference") topics. They were doing this kind of structured documentation before DITA was a thing. It's a pain in the ass to produce content this way, but the results are wonderful.

Then came .NET Core: a fast-moving, community-driven effort, where the philosophy seems to be to get it working and then scribble down some docs later. The result tends to be a huge wall of text with conceptual and sample topics jammed together ([2]), and you're lucky if the API reference gives you anything beyond parameter names.

Azure docs suffer from a different problem. It seems they've tried to apply some kind of rough information architecture, but the quality isn't great. I've looked at the GitHub history of some of the shoddier topics, and they're often written by junior Product Managers who are fresh out of college. I encounter a lot of imprecise, colloquial English describing out-of-date screenshots.

I don't mean to belittle the people who work on .NET Core and Azure. There's a ton of content that needs to be written for these products, and it's a thankless task for the devs & PMs who do the heavy lifting now. I'd really like to see some dedicated technical writers come in and bring the quality back up to their old standards.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winsock/windo... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/ro...

Back in the day, when Sun was still in-charge of Java, I had my 1-person consulting company partner with Sun and become an official "Certified Java" organization... Great, I thought - now I can get some better documentation...

Sure, Sun replied - but first you have to buy a $30,000 server... Thankfully, .NET hit public beta about then and I have never looked back.

It got so bad that a VP ended up making a pronouncement, declaring a war on broken links. He announced a multi-year plan to reduce and eventually fix all the broken links on MSDN. This was the vacuum that was partially responsible for the birth of Stack Overflow.

Probably Scott Guthrie initiated that. As some nobody I once emailed him directly because I'd discovered a bug in some framework thing with a reproducible example. He actually replied and cc'd in the relevant people at MS and after a short while there was a workaround and a fix and a KB article or something (it's so long ago I barely remember). Impressed? absolutely. MS still have some pretty good and accessible folks, and I'm a huge fan of Scott Hanselman who's a great brand ambassador for DevDiv (and not beyond a few self-deprecating MS jokes about the company's past).

Documentation pages that showed a method's signature with no explanation of the function or example usage. So many times I'd look something up only to find the method name parroted as a full sentence; and those method names were often obscure to the point of meaninglessness.

Anything that was available online, official or not, was inferior to that. I'm not sure if it was deliberate, but it significantly hampered the utility of pirated copies of Visual Studio - since MSDN docs would require a lot more CDs than the software, most warez releases stripped them out. And in the developing world, where such pirated software is readily available on physical CDs sold by street vendors, they would usually be priced per CD regardless of what's on it - so a complete VS+MSDN bundle would be a lot more expensive, and thus in relatively low demand, and not widely sold.

It's a hard sell to tell an IT decision-maker in a different team/group that you need to configure things "just so" (think TechNet versus MSDN for configuration/operational articles) when all you have to point them too is a non-official blog post...

(Don't even get me started about the quality/out-of-date materials for things like Dynamics 365...)

In the personal computing world, first parties can't build enough user software.

Furthermore, software availability and reliability lag third party developer and development ecosystem health. A bad experience doesn't hurt the platform today, it hurts the platform in 1+ years.

And perhaps even worse, steps to address it take effect over a 1+ year timeframe as well.

Apple's been able to leverage iOS market share into papering over the desktop reality, but they're going to find the emperor has no clothes real quickly if anything about that calculus shifts in a bad way.

It didn't work out for them back then, and so we got native apps and the store. But I can't help but think that Apple still sees it as a sort of compromise of their ideal vision of what the platform should really be like, and thus dev ecosystem evolution is mostly on the backburner. Just look at how long it took for Swift to appear, despite Obj-C being really dated by that time.

It's the "culture that rewards and values the work" that's really the issue, I suspect. Apple certainly used to have a culture of good documentation, and I know they've hired good writers, technical and otherwise, over the years. It's actually kind of difficult to explain why their docs are the way they are, other than just not putting any real priority on the necessary work.

I thought that was what the $99/year was for.

I would love to have paid version of most of the apps/sites I use. Not ad-free subscription but paid version where I can be the unhappy customer when I am unhappy.

MSDN Library. Everything old is new again.

The documentation of software packages, APIs, and driver kits was freely available online.

No, it hasn't. It was originally available exclusively to subscribers, and only on CD. MSDN started before the web existed.

Eventually, the documentation became free on the web.

No it wasn't - the subscription service shipped CDs (and later DVDs) with technical articles, updated SDKs and the like. The actual documentation was always included with every Visual Studio version on the installation discs.

I remember quite vividly the "joy" of re-installing the latest version because the documentation format was incompatible between releases and you could either reinstall the new version from disc (which took ages) or convert the already installed one (which also took ages, but not quite as long as juggling 4 CDs - it had to "rebuild the index" or some nonsense like that IIRC).

So if you owned a physical copy of any Visual Studio edition, you also had the documentation and thus no need to subscribe to MSDN (apart from the technical columns, SDK updates and the magazine, which any reasonable boss would allow you to read during work hours).

You seem to be arguing against a negative value judgement which I did not make, or even suggest.