Why full sources?

I've had a couple requests to include the complete source code for the samples in the hwnd interop white paper.  And I'm going to try to include them in the official Avalon SDK version (although my first priority right now is getting images in there -- the draft I saw today had my images stripped out!).  But I'll confess, I don't really understand why people want the full source for these particular samples, so I wanted to get your feedback so I could better understand how people use and learn from these papers. 

My confusion is, this paper is not about teaching you how to write Win32 program, or about how to write a pure Avalon program -- it's about taking existing Win32 and Avalon code and putting them together.  And I showed every single line of "putting it together" in that paper -- the part I didn't show is the pure Win32 and pure Avalon code.  (And it's not very imaginative code, either -- if you're learning Win32 or Avalon programming from these samples, you won't  learn very much!)  So it's not obvious to me what value the complete sample adds over what's already in the paper.  Is it that people don't believe I included everything?  Is it too hard to understand where the interop code goes in the larger program?  Is the Avalon code more interesting than I realize?  Are you having to learn or relearn a sizable amount of Win32 as part of your interop project?  Is being able to run the sample through a debugger part of how you learn it?

I'd love to hear people's take so I can do the right thing on future samples.  Thanks!

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 27, 2005
  Hey Nick,
  
  I think some people simply like to build the samples and run it before trying out some code of their own. It's a mental thing I guess :-)
• Anonymous
  July 28, 2005
  Yeah, I agree with Nish. It's like .NET remoting -- even though I had read books about it and was shown code that supposedly worked across machines. It wasn't until I compiled and tried it myself that I was convinced of it's coolness. :-)