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Comment by GFunc | Hacker News Reader

No more ".Net magic" now that the curtain's dropped.

I think this will help .Net devs make smarter decisions about their code now that they can see what's happening in the background.

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I'm not sure whether there ever was a time when .NET devs had to seriously consider "what was happening in the background". .NET Framework documentation has always been pretty good. Not too many dark corners there.

Not a .NET dev myself, but I believe Android's documentation is also pretty good. Nevertheless, I can distinctly recall instances when looking at Android's source was necessary/helpful.

Having done a lot of C# and Java (both of which are very well documented) in the past and a little bit of Android development recently, I cannot confirm that. The documentation is a horrible mess of a few helpful things (most longer texts introducing platform quirks and intricacies are useful), barely documented things (many, many parts of the class libraries) and downright undocumented things (styles, where the "documentation" even tells you to read the source). (Not to mention the plethora of typos and misspellings in the official docs.)

Generally I've not been very impressed with the quality of Android's documentation and firmly believe a company such as Google can do better. And after having a look at the process around getting a patch approved I deemed it not worth my time trying to contribute documentation fixes and enhancements.

And the system libraries are cake to decompile if you really need to dig into the innards. I've only had to do that on one or two occasions, and it was more for curiosity sake (I think once I wanted a copy of the html character code encoding table and didn't want to piece it together by hand.)

Additionally, they released the reference source code for .NET[0] a while back, so there is always that to dig through as well.

[0]: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/

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