Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcl | Hacker News Reader

I notice Microsoft regularly breaks its own developer URLs as well... even the links from within Visual Studio's help system to their online content. It's sad that the most reliable way to find documentation is through Google.

View on HN

MSDN is a mess, so much so that at a previous employer we setup our own MSDN server and hacked it up with a wiki, we mirrored entire sites, including Sysinternals and Windows Developer Journal and the DDK sites; MS specially fucked this company up so bad, in other respects as well, that the teams were warned against adopting any new Microsoft technologies; we stuck to raw ODBC and NT driver model, even for Vista.

Or you could install it locally... The installed MSDN library is rock solid. I've yet to find an instance of the online docs being better.

When I have used online help in visual studio, the worst problems I experienced were some formatting issues.

Ideally, this shouldn't happen anymore; or, at least they've designed the current system to stop it from happening: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163845.aspx

Incidentally, Google tends to break CPAN's documentation a lot. If I visit the "canonical URL" for a module, something like http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Foo::Bar, it always works. If I google for Foo::Bar, though, sometimes I get linked to http://search.cpan.org/dist/Foo-Bar-0.17, which is 404 because the author deleted version 0.17 and uploaded 0.18.

Amusing that other people have the opposite problem.

You can't delete anything from CPAN.

I've never experienced what you describe.

You can actually. I can’t find a link now, but I’m pretty sure it’s actively encouraged so as not to clutter up the CPAN with obsolete versions of modules.

That’s why we have things like http://backpan.perl.org/

... Or bing. Maybe it's a deep rooted conspiracy to get you on bing. Or not...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com