Visual Studio 2005 Beta Support: A Joke

When I wrote that post I had just spent half a day running around on a wild goose chase trying to use Microsoft support and documentation for Visual Studio NET 2005 products. Obviously, I was still angry.
But, to put things in perspective, I am glad that I am able to get the free Microsoft products in the first place. And, Visual Studio NET 2005 products seem to be the most exciting advancement in personal database and C++ software available.

But, I really still believe that Microsoft's tutorials and library documentation are seriously flawed. How?

First, when you do a search for a C++ topic you often are getting outdated information. When the information is updated it often is not all updated collectively.

There have been so many changes to C++ including the 2003 to 2005 keyword syntax changes and the depreciated header files in the libraries. Yet, different help pages will not all reflect the changes in a centralized place. You find pieces of the puzzle scatterd around with updated info put into some pages but not into other pages.

And, much of the old code samples won't work in the newer compilers unless it is modified first or the compiler settings are changed. This is very problematic for new users. The confusion is enormous. They don't update sample code often enough.

The interactive tutorials did not function at all when I tried them. The page links led nowhere.

The Getting Started pages and Web Casts (audio only) for SQL Server 2005 were really all useless. I wanted to know how to open the program and construct a simple database and table using the graphic interface...the obvious first lessons. I really couldn't find anything to show me that simple first step.

Many of the code samples to show you things will introduce an additional unnecessary complex topic within that same sample code. So, you will be trying to learn about a pointer and the sample will throw in a recursion or an enumeration. Usually the secondary complex topic will not be relevent or needed to learn the topic you searched for. It is just something that makes a new user lose focus on the intended topic. An experienced programmer may smile; but, someone trying out the samples to see if they like the language will be frustrated and learn slower than necessary.

It's also amazing how you can read five pages of product descriptions and still not really be shown (with screenshots) or told what exactly a program can and can't perform. The product descriptions are often vague descriptions which rely mostly on filling pages with superlative keywords ("exciting", "powerful").

These are just some of the many flaws in the support and documentation pages I have seen. If some of these problems were corrected, Microsoft products could be easier to learn. And, Microsoft could gain a better following and reputation amongst new potential customers.

Thanks for letting us know about this problem in our documentation. I'm the doc manager for Visual C++, and we have plans to improve the documentation for using SQL Server 2005 with Visual C++ 2005. For this product cycle, we have the ability to update the online documentation after the product ships, so once we've made these improvements, you'll be able to see them if you use select online Help in the Development Environment.

That's great. Yes typically the RTM documentation for large software projects is MUCH better than beta documentation. The reason is that most of the documentation work is done in the last half of the development cycle after the product starts to stabilize.

Using the WMI Cleanup tool was clever also. I'll have to try that myself!

Michael