Paul Cornell

I am from the VC++/C# support team and have come across many many customers who have expressed their concerns about documentation. It would be difficult for me to pass on the message by just addressing your specific question so i will be a little more lengthy.

1) More (Better) "Getting Started" or "Essentials" pages and More (Better) "Best Practices" pages.

Most concerns i have come across are people who got irritated because sometimes the help was just not "detailed" enough or wrong. When we bring out a new product - we must compulsorily release an extensive list of ALL features that have changed in the product and how have they changed - so that customer's know what can they continue to do like they did and what they can't do any longer.

2) Can't be specific - but i think we definitely need a lot more documentation (not just marketing stuff) on the product itself. Most of the customer's that i have come across - have complained something like "We had this feature in VS 2003 (or VS 6) - now we can't find how to do it in VS 2005"; "It was so much more simpler in VS 2003 now it takes a lot more clicks to do the same"; "This feature does now works differently" and worse "This feature does not work as documented"

3) After i got my hands on VS 2005 first - the first thing that i did not like was the help system - now that i have got a bit more used to it - i crib less about it. But essentially - i found it a lot more slower than 2003; less intuitive.
One thing i feel is that customer do not like things in the GUI to be moved around too frequently (and if we do decide to do that - we should always give them an option of how to configure their IDE like the previous version - infact i would suggest that we have a xml file that the users can customize such that they can continue using the features in the older version just as they are used to and add the new ones like they want.)

Help on Help is good - but haven't we just introduced another layer of work for the busy developer? We should be working at making things simpler - study user patterns and adapt the UI to it.

4) It would be a good idea to include the blogs of the developers in a separate section and search through them too. Though you asked for one only, i will take a chances and request one more - how about integrating help with intellisense? give some ballon tips that when clicked can take you to the relevant link - this would be highly effective - because when you know the loction of the code - you can make more inferences about what the developer is looking for whether it is syntax, error, best practice etc realted to that particular thing.

Hi,

I am trying to work on extending visual studio using packages and till now my experience is that the only documentation available on using packages is the sdk documentation and i can tell you that its really not very helpful.
I am currently trying to find out some documentation on how the ironpython sample was created so that i can use that sample to work around my solution.
Books written on visual studio doesnt contain any thing about creating packages and samples available with sdk is all that a package developer can use to work with.