Hi there,

This isn't meant to start a war as I'm honestly looking for opinions. Does
anyone find the VS help as substandard as I do (for .NET in particular). I
don't understand MSFT. Today's documentation is worse than what VC6 offered.
Whenever I run a search (Ctrl+Alt+F3) for instance, I almost never find what
I'm looking for. In fact, most of the time the topics that come up are
irrelevant. You can't search previous search results (why on earth was this
removed), wildcards are no longer supported, etc. What they do give us (the
ability to confine a search to "Language", "Technology" and "Content "Type")
is almost useless given how broad the topics listed here are (the latter two
in particular). It almost never improves the search results. Even the "Index
Results" can be incredibly annoying. If I type "Control class" in the "Look
for" edit box for instance and then press <Enter>, the "Index Results"
window that shows up at the bottom currently displays three (3) different
versions of this class in VS2008 (for "presentation framework", "system.web"
and "system.windows.forms" - the situation is basically the same in VS2005).
You then have to pick one even though the first in the list shows up in the
top (main) window automatically (which is incredibly irritating since I
didn't explicitly pick it and it's almost always the wrong one). This occurs
for many different classes but in reality most people are only working with
one of these technologies at a time. Would it have been so difficult to
provide an option to always pick the one we're working with and bring it up
(say, "system.windows.forms"). And what about case-sensitve searches and
regular searching in general. These are technical documents after all and
they frequently require a high-degree of search precision. Lastly, and by
far the worst problem, the amount of information provided for many .NET
classes is woefully inadequate to get the job done. I almost always have to
augment the information by conducting painful web searches when MSDN should
have been the definitive source. It's also dangerous to trust anyone outside
of MSFT and nobody should have to. In fact, I calculate (without
exaggeration) that the program I've been working on for the past 20 months
(now winding down at last) has literally taken 50% longer than the
(WinAPI-based) C++ programs I used to work on (on a proportional basis).
It's caused no end of grief and frustration and it's mostly been due to a
serious lack of documentation. If MSFT doesn't realize how serious the
problem is then they should take some advice from someone who's been working
on their platforms since the XT. I don't normally denigrate MSFT (just the
opposite in fact), but the docs are in serious need of a major overhaul.
Tell me I'm not the only one who's suffering with these problems? End rant.