On Microsoft and Developer Learning

For a while now I had been expecting better developer documentation from Microsoft. You’d think if you were looking for tips and ideas on how to develop software that Microsoft would know a thing or two. I mean they write a lot of software (some better than others) and they have several development tools and platforms.

And there is a ton of documentation on specific tools or examples how to use some specific classes in excruciating detail. However, as far as general software design, architecture, and processes they haven’t had much. And that’s the kind of stuff I was looking for.

Then it dawned on me that a tool vendor is going to document how to use all the extended features and document as much as they can about their tool. But many of the principals of good design are platform independent. In fact good practice is often to go for the general case and only use the specialized features when necessary, and even then you build abstraction layers around them.

Then there is the quote “the sky is a different color at Microsoft.” i.e. Microsoft is so big that most everything they use comes from Microsoft. If an idea wasn’t invented there or they have not made their own version of a tool, they often appear ignorant that such an idea or tool exists.

I guess all I’m saying is that I no longer expect this kind of info from Microsoft. Instead I’ve been doing much better learning from blogs, open source projects, and books (lots of books.) The do have a patterns & practices group and they have been improving and the talk about the ASP.NET MVC framework seems promising (lots of examples of interacting with existing open source software.)