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API Usability Study Article Posted

I bloged a while back about the Dr. Dobbs on Measuring API Usability.  I just got permission from the nice folks at Dr. Dobbs to post the article publicly for your reading pleasure.  

 

Any teams at Microsoft you think I should print off a copy and hand-deliver this to ;-)

 

Love to hear any comments or questions you have on it.

 

Update 4-17-2007: Updated link to the paper...

Published 27 April 04 10:03 by BradA

Comments

# marko said on April 27, 2004 10:55 AM:
Nice artical...
# B.Y. said on April 27, 2004 3:49 PM:
Thanks, Bard.

How about the guys who designed the DirectShow API, all that filter/pin stuff.

# Mike Dimmick said on April 28, 2004 2:00 AM:
The .NET Compact Framework team. The APIs are nice and usable up until the point where you try to do something complicated, at which point you a) have to P/Invoke all the native APIs because all the escape hatches have been removed and b) swear loudly because the marshaller has very little power, and you're swamped in unsafe code.
# Ken Cowan said on April 28, 2004 6:26 AM:

System.Management team. Cruising the WMI repository is complex, and not well documented. From a 10,000 foot level it ought to be simple. It's just a bunch of metadata describing types and instances of types.

Next, System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal and our friend IntPtr. Ever try to use the BSTR returned from StringToBSTR from MC++? Ever try to walk an unmanaged buffer with ReadInt32 and friends and then realize you have a string and need to use PtrToStringUni? Hmm, no offset param so I have to do the pointer arithmetic myself. I'll just add the offset to my IntPtr, but no wait, you can't do arithmetic on an IntPtr. ... But I rant.

KC
# Dave Donaldson said on April 29, 2004 11:14 AM:
# Peter Provost said on May 5, 2004 8:53 AM:
The SharePoint team (both portal and WSS) need to read this.
# Geek Noise said on May 5, 2004 11:55 AM:
# Ring said on July 31, 2004 4:30 AM:
It is good, have boundless prospects
# Brad Abrams said on April 9, 2007 11:15 AM:

Steven Clarke (a usability researcher here at Microsoft) has published a set of very interesting papers

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