Bugs In Microsoft Technical Documentation Rising 146
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."
Re:To the editors (Score:5, Informative)
For a browser, use Firefox with a properly installed ad-blocker extension. Heck, there are remedies to this. So stop whining.
Now back to the topic. I think this could be a delaying tactic by Microsoft.
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Informative)
I once copy-pasted some demo code from MSDN and it didn't work. That's a bug in documentation even by your standards.
Re:"Bugs"? (Score:3, Informative)
Do they mean documentation shows bugs with Microsoft's communication protocols or that the documentation is incomplete or erroneous?
I'd think "bugs in documentation" means the documentation is doing it wrong. Doing it right would be accurately and fully describing what it's supposed to document.
So I figure it means incomplete and/or erroneous.
I'm of the viewpoint that a disagreement between observable software behavior and claims stated in the documentation is a bug in the documentation: it's either incorrect, or it's incomplete in that it doesn't say "beware of the software bug [...]".
Re:"Bugs"? (Score:2, Informative)
I read it as that the documentation is incomplete or erroneous. The article talks about "technical documentation issues" and says "the company is working to fix problems with the documentation".
Re:"Bugs"? (Score:5, Informative)
What bothers me most about MSDN documentation is that I've noticed information pertaining to the behavior of common API's on older versions of Windows disappearing. Just because Microsoft no longer supports an OS doesn't mean that a developer does not want to write compatible code for it. Sometimes I have to refer to local copies of older MSDN documentation and the online version to get a complete picture.
I also dislike that often searching MSDN documentation for C API's often results in you getting the .net versions as the top results, a cunning way to push their own languages I'm sure but I find it very annoying.