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Is assistance a factor in deciding to migrate?

So, you think about adding support for your product on another operating system, development platform, or maybe you are evaluating the latest version of Visual Studio.  Does the quality of the assistance (wizards, online and offline documentation, logging features, etc) that you get in attempting that migration ultimately affect your decision to migrate?

Recently I received some feedback from a set of customers that said they would pay for a new version of Visual Studio if it simply had better help and made it easier to understand how to do the things it already does. 

What say you, blog readers?  Is the help system something that you would consider a Value-Add?

Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts!

--April

Published Monday, August 21, 2006 10:07 AM by AprilR
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Monday, August 21, 2006 6:15 PM by legolas

# re: Is assistance a factor in deciding to migrate?

Where I work at least, the only reason to changing support for end-user things is end user need (communicated by Sales/marketing/whatever as 'We need to support x in the next version. Make it so.').

Migrating to another development platform etc is not done unless required by any of the end-user changes, or for (other) technical reasons.
Generally, once a codebase gets large, moving to another IDE for example, and converting all projects etc, getting all the bugs out of those, working around the new compiler bugs, getting the IDe set up on every machine and integrated with the existing scc etc, getting every one to know the new IDE and everything around etc etc are all so time consuming no matter how good the 'wizards' and docs, that nobody even wants to think about it.

The only real reason to change anything like that would be a clear benifit larger than all of the above troubles combined. So unless the IDE will write all our code for us, probably not.

What does happen is a gradual transition where some projects may use the new IDE etc.

In case of Visual studio 2005 however, that's not very likely, as licenses would need to be bought first, and that will be the end of any attempt to start to use it right there.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006 8:23 AM by Radeldudel

# re: Is assistance a factor in deciding to migrate?

I don't care much about the help system. I use F1 sometimes, but usually it contains way too much information, but not the information I'm looking for.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006 11:06 AM by patbateman

# re: Is assistance a factor in deciding to migrate?

The new help system is the worst thing i ever seen. Maybe it would work better if i installed english only, but with german it´s really bad. Some points:

- It´s much slower
- It does not allways find things
- Often there are "Document not found" errors
- Pressing F1 in "Search resuts" or "Output" Window opens the Help system, but not with the information i marked in the window.

-Why the hell are so many temp files in the document and settings folder???

I would like to get back my old MSDN help sytstem!!!

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