Are you kidding? Seriously, is this a joke?
Literally 99% of anything I search for in Microsoft documentation these days lands me in a page where the only additional English text is the function definition with spaces added between the words! Entire APIs are 100% undocumented, at least in this sense. Security-related APIs are totally undocumented. APIs critical to disaster recovery are totally undocumented. I could go on and on.
It wasn't always like this! The C# standard library documented used to be fantastic, with multiple pages of text for pretty much every function. Now? It's hot garbage.
Let me give you an example. Not a contrived example of some obscure API that nobody cares about, but a "flagship" feature of dotnet core that was heavily advertised recently as a significant step forward in its capabilities:
System.IO.Pipelines
This is a complex, difficult to use API. How is it documented, you ask? There's a couple of out-of-date videos showing an earlier version that no long matches the current names. There's some announcement blog articles. There's
one overview page that almost -- but doesn't quite -- cover enough to write a useful real-world application. The rest of the documentation reads like this:
// Gets the MemoryPool to use when allocating memory.
public System.Buffers.MemoryPool Pool { get; }
(From:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.io.pipeli... )
I am enlightened! I understand now. Before that documentation page, I could not figure out that a getter called "Pool" returning "MemoryPool" returns a memory pool to use for memory allocation. But wow, that documentation really cleared things up!
I know I'm being more than a bit snarky, but it's deserved.
Microsoft's work is not GNU. It's not truly open source. It's not made by volunteers. MSFT is not a charity. In fact, their products in general are very expensive. I pay through the nose for this! I pay through Windows licensing. I pay through Azure hosting costs. I pay through Office 365.
What do I get for this money? Function names with spaces added.
> The best thing for me is that when I click the "Edit" button on Microsoft's documentation, it takes me directly to the latest markdown source file on GitHub and I can immediately submit a PR for corrections or enhancements.
That is the worst thing about Microsoft documentation. They've realised that they no longer need to allocate any budget at all to technical writers, because people like you will happily volunteer your own time to fix something you're already paying for with your actual cash money.
Stop.
If you're going to volunteer your time, do it for a charity. Write a Wikipedia article or contribute to Linux. Don't use your precious time on this Earth to help the world's second biggest company for no compensation whatsoever!