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Bugs In Microsoft Technical Documentation Rising
snydeq writes "The number of bugs in technical documentation for Microsoft communication protocols continues to grow, according to court documents filed for ongoing antitrust oversight of the company in the US. Problems with the technical documentation — which includes 1,660 identified bugs as of Dec. 31, up from 1,196 bugs on Nov. 30 — remain the major complaint from lawyers representing the group of 19 states that joined the US Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. Lawyers for the states have complained repeatedly that technical documentation issues are opening faster than Microsoft can close them. Nearly 800 Microsoft employees are working on the more than 20,000 pages of technical documentation, according to the court documents filed Wednesday."
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I think that MS needs to realize that one of the major reasons that standards exist is to PREVENT these things from happening. If there weren't so many inconsistencies, this would be markedly more difficult.
But what do I know about MS anyway? Who am I to comment on their ineptitudes? I use Linux.
http://www.allen-poole.com/
They were obviously instructed to produce documentation that accurately reflects their software. So that would be latter...
.. with simply completing the TDS specification. Prossibly one of their most widely used protocols and it's entirely out of date, and what's there is incorrect in many ways or just incomplete.
They should prioritize, but I'll do it for them.
1.)SMB
2.)TDS
3.)whatever the hell goes on with Exchange
4.)remote desktop
5.)MSN
6.)the rest
That's almost like continuing to eat at a restaurant that serves you food with shit on it just because you have "shitblocker" extension installed.
And then telling other people to stop whining and just install a shitblocker.
Yes I know ads aren't that bad (normally anyway).
Print view
I would contend that all articles should link to the print preview if the article has obnoxious ads or superfluous page breaks, but then they'd just stop providing print views.
Keep this to yourselves. ;)
Question everything
Because it causes problems for THEM, regardless of the EU.
This may be apocryphal, but ISTR reading somewhere that when they needed documentation (for internal purposes) on SMB, they had to use the Samba guys' stuff.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
It may be awesome, but it's symptomatic of a poor development culture at MS, and ties back into the lack of protocol documentation.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Try Qt. Their documentation is absolutely awesome. I worked with MSDN after working with Qt, and it was an eye opener.
We have at all times had a documentation system at MS to do exactly that. The problem is that it has been messed around with, upgraded, changed, politicised, etc so often, that getting reliable info out of it to code to is harder than just tracing the relevant source and doing it yourself. This, of course, introduces new bugs which are not documented either. I've been pushing to scrap the whole damned mess and create an internal wiki but you know what institutional inertia is like.