Comment by cryptonector
2 years ago
I had a similar experience with MSFT docs when working at Sun. The docs were not very good, and though they seemed somewhat redacted, it felt like in fact their internal docs probably weren't much better.
2 years ago
I had a similar experience with MSFT docs when working at Sun. The docs were not very good, and though they seemed somewhat redacted, it felt like in fact their internal docs probably weren't much better.
Don't tall into that trap of thinking.
Many years ago I knew an ex-microsoft engineer. Microsoft had poor interoperability with something, and I speculated that engineers in microsoft didn't know what 3rd parties were doing and accidentally broke things.
He told me, "don't be naive - microsoft would have meetings saying 'how can we own this?'"
Not to cast doubt on your friend's story, I worked on both the SQL Server team and later on the Windows kernel team in the early 2000s (the bad years). I came from "outside" meaning I had already had a career at non-Microsoft-related companies (mostly startups using linux on the server). I was continually shocked at how _little_ the MSFT employees seemed to know about the industry, or how their customers used their own products.
As an example, this was the era of the J2EE App Server. Almost none of the people I worked with knew what an App Server was, despite the #1 database in use by App Server customers being MSFT SQL Server.
During the Ballmer era MSFT was famous for the lack of cooperation between and within teams. That's what you get when you use stack ranking to decide compensation.
This was before that, early to mid 90's era
I still don't know what an app server is. Isn't that one of those things from the enterprise programming era where they'd get "architects" to design an "enterprise system" and it would come with twenty different things with names like "message bus" and "dependency injection" that no program in history has ever actually needed?
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Microsoft's documentation for Microsoft's own technologies (as in, the C# libraries they provide) is terrible. What's the competitive advantage there?
That is not true in my experience, Windows API is superbly documented and C# docs are of far higher quality than Java's
The C# documentation was, at least in its initial years, very good. It even had working examples that demonstrated functions. Compare that to typical javadoc of its time.
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