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When I used to use VB 6 in my high school MSDN was just fantastic, I never looked anywhere else for help. Then came .NET and online MSDN and whatnot, and there were no longer any practical examples of anything. I slowly started to avoid MSDN and now when I search something on Google I straight away add -msdn in there.
If you take a simple example of ArrayList count there is nothing mentioning that count has to be used like this:
ArrayList tmpArray = new ArrayList();
tmpArray.Add("something");
LabelCount.text = tmpArray.Count;
The way MSDN has it is actually really helpful if you have a basic idea of what member variables are etc. But if you are new to C# in general, you would be completely lost.
PHP documentation is so neat! A simple strlen has a neat depiction of what are the return values, parameters for function etc, plus the comment section has lots of users giving out so many valuable usage example of strlen which I find really amazingly relevant and helpful.
Is there a way to look at things and understand in MSDN? How do you guys refer MSDN?
Microsoft's documentation does not have the beauty and simplicity that linux man or info has, but still, it's very comprehensive. You need to know that it's not tutorials in most cases, it's reference documentation, that assumes you already know how to use that function.
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I found a great article here:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/18204/ASP-NET-controls-to-display-enum-values
where I studied it, learned a lot, and incorporated it as a new class library in my Visual Studio Solution.
Having borrowed the code and utilized in a web application, what is the best way to link up the original article on CodeProject to my Visual Studio solution (multiple projects) both so I can "bookmark" this article for later reference by me and my team member(s) and give credit to the original developer who came up with the idea. One idea I had would be an AboutBox in the EnumControls class library but the more I think about that it seems a bit stupid (I really only want some doc available at design time for my co-workers and for my future leaky brain).
How about a works cited page (text file in your solution) and then comments in code files where the code is actually used. This gives you and the other developers some immediate context of where it came from, but the solution level text file provides an artifact in your software process.
The VB.NET XML comment (''') would allow for IntelliSense documentation as well, which may be overkill, but it would be available to developers at code implementation time.
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I am documenting a small itcl project. Due to shortcomings in itcl support in doxygen, and the fact that Ruff! does not support itcl, I am left with NaturalDocs and RoboDoc as the leading candidates. However, I don't want to pick an unsupported system, and was wondering which is going to be there in the long term?
What will be there in the long term? Who knows! It depends on how much people use it, really, as with all open source code systems. It should be noted that both the tools you refer to are really slow developing at this point: they do what they do and need little significant change to keep on doing it.
As far as I can see, ROBODoc requires that you do pretty much all the annotation work yourself, whereas NaturalDocs will derive a bit more for you. Not very much though; in particular, you will have to write plenty of annotations on things whichever route you use. (I've no particular experience with either though; I tend to prefer to maintain documentation in a separate file with something like doctools but that's a very different approach. I've also done nasty custom things in the past; you really don't want to use them.)
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For me it's got to be the Microsoft SQL Server Cast and Convert reference. I must love that page, I seem to visit it several times a day.
PHP Documentation for me - clear, concise, user tips (although these are not always correct and secure - pinch of salt etc). Also good for typing directly into an address bar if you know the function name, eg php.net/in_array - straight to the function's page.
The YUI documentation has had a good number of views over my last few projects...a good example of a clear and concise API
Definitely should be http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt :)
It depends a lot on what I'm doing and what my toolset is. In generaly these days it is probably Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language.
From time to time, I still find that people need my services maintaining/fixing/adding new features to ASP site (VBScript) pages from time to time (yuck). The MSDN VBScript reference is usually all I need.
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I want to make a technical documentation of an existing web site for developers so that new developers can continue to work with it. In existing codes, little (or not at all) in-code comments or doc-strings are available (bad practice, I know). Yeah, I have seen some posts related to these. But those were not that detailed. Here are all my questions:
What to include?
How to organize? I mean, can you suggest some hierarchy so that new developers can easily get onto the track?
What are the best practices?
Can you show some samples?
How can it be made easy? Some ppl suggests wiki tool but I know nothing about it, will it be useful? Can you suggest any tool with some quick starting tutorial?
I have never made one. So I appreciate any kind of answer. Thanks in advance.
(Links will be helpful but please give a quick and lucid summary of it)
Quick and lucid:
Think of it like any paper.
What is the goal of the app (website)? [why?]
How does it achieve this goal?
What problems have arisen?
What problems could arise?
What could be expanded upon? [why?]
What problems could expansion cause? [why?]
What naming/formatting conventions should continue to be followed?
Outline format is great.
In addition to Nona's suggestion I would also say that it is important to break down the code and explain any conventions and intentions of the code so that there is uniformity between developers for things like ID values, CSS classes, and JavaScript function names. Be as specific as you determine necessary to prevent a new person to the team from reinventing work.
If you're looking for a quick way to get through your code, try .NET Reflector. It gives you a broad overview of all your classes, methods, properties, etc. so that you can write all the technical documentation you need without actually going through the files. It's super easy to browse through and it will even show you the code itself.
Have you thought about representing what is there with some UML notation? That's what UML is for! If the new developers are good then they should be able to understand it.
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I'm looking for a good in depth documentation/how-to for DataContractSerializer. Google turns up a number of related articles but nothing jumped out at me. (I'm not looking for the MSDN link)
A little clarification: I have never use serialization in .NET but have a working app that does that I need to update/modify. I have a fairly good Idea how I would do what I need to do if I had designed the serialization system but I'd rather not hunt trough a pile of MSDN class documentation looking for how they expect me to do it. The MSDN stuff works well for figuring out how something works (as does Google because at that point you have a specific term to Google) What I would like is a well done "here is how it works and this is all the details" document targeted at showing me how to fit the pieces together rather than figuring out how they work. I'm afraid what I'm looking for is a bit of an "I'll know it when I see it" thing, and I have never had good luck Googeling for that sort of thing.
I'm particularly interested in specific pages that people have used and personally found very useful. If you are thinking of something particular right now (before going to Google) that is what I'm looking for. If not...
Try this MSDN link instead, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733127.aspx
but I'd rather not hunt trough a pile
of MSDN class documentation looking
for how they expect me to do it.
It's Microsoft, what do you expect??? You ARE expected to use it the way they want it. :)
This article is very helpful because it shows the benefits of DataContractSerializer in contrast to XmlSerializer. This was the first article I used when learning about WCF and DataContractSerializer.
Not to be disparaging but isn't a Google search the best way to get this kind of information? The most helpful and informative links will be on the first page as those will be the most linked and visited.