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Comment by ultramancool | Hacker News Reader

I do too, but I also use Qt Creator and Eclipse for writing C++ on RTOSes and I really don't think VS is anything special.

I will agree with you about the documentation, with few exceptions MS documentation is some of the best written. But this is far from something that should prevent a platform swap.

The piss poor code editing tools in VC++ irk me more than anything, I have to say that I feel like it's the worst of these platforms. Resharper for C++ is coming though, so maybe that'll change my mind.

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I'll disagree there. After spending hours trying to make sense of the Win32 API documentation in msdn. Often failing to make sense of it, finding the answer in Raymond Chen blog a long with a few lines pointing out that the msdn documentation doesn't cover some important cases/caveats.

Don't forget all of the undocumented API's which you are not to use unless you're a really big vendor then you get special documentation and/or special API's built just for you.

Most all Win32 stuff works just fine. It is documented better than _any_ one Linux module/layer. There is no comparison. But these days I don't even need to bother with Win32, .NET handles 99.9% of what I need to do. Then again I am not a driver developer.

Eh, some of it is a huge pain.

I wanted to write a simple tool to mute a game when I tabbed out of it.

No access to per-app volume controls from .NET without the use of some random paid libraries. So I went with C++. Access via C++ involved incredibly complicated COM APIs, which were very poorly documented (the whole COM system itself was confusing but these APIs in particular involved a ridiculous level of nesting) and no good clear examples were available.

Easily more confusing than the simple calls into the DBus interface for pulseaudio to achieve the same thing on an Ubuntu desktop system.

* this is far from something that should prevent a platform swap*

When I started Android development, the quality of documentation was so far below what I was used to from Microsoft that it hurt. If not for StackOverflow I would probably have given up and switched to Microsoft's mobile platform.

Besides that, I'm not impressed by IntelliJ. Not even a little bit. I am however, vastly impressed by Visual Studio and all the IDE's that are based on it.

The Android docs and Java docs are actually quite good though IMO. Is there somewhere in particular you felt they were lacking?

You want to see some poorly documented stuff, check out BouncyCastle's "lightweight API" or OpenSceneGraph. Great libraries, but figuring them out is a serious investment.

Honestly I don't remember anymore because if I search for help on anything, I now actively avoid the android site and just take the StackOverflow links instead.

Maybe Android docs aren't so bad in comparison to most documentation. However, in comparison to Microsoft's they are severely lacking. And this is coming from someone who used to bitch at all the errors he found in the Microsoft docs!

I like both IntelliJ and Visual Studio. Why do you like the latter better?

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