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Your Feedback Wanted to Improve Visual Studio Help

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Last week, I asked several customers who were visiting Microsoft to give me some feedback on the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 documentation and the Visual Studio 2005 SDK documentation. I'd like to give you the opportunity to participate also -- simply add a comment to this blog post containing your responses. Here are the four questions that I asked them:

  1. If you use Visual Studio 2005, if you could vote for only *two* of the following types of Help pages/topics for us to improve in the documentation for future Visual Studio versions, what would they be?
    1. More "Getting Started" or "Essentials" pages
    2. More "Guided Tour" pages
    3. More "How To" pages
    4. More end-to-end "Walkthrough" pages
    5. Deeper architectural coverage
    6. More "Best Practices" pages
  2. If you use the Visual Studio 2005 SDK to customize or extend Visual Studio 2005, and if you could vote for only *four* of the following areas for us to improve the documentation in future Visual Studio SDK releases, what would they be?
    1. VSPackages
    2. Services
    3. Menu and Toolbar Extensibility
    4. Tool Window Extensibility
    5. Project Extensibility
    6. Language Integration
    7. Editor Extensibility
    8. Debugging Extensibility
    9. Help Integration and Extensibility (including HelpStudio Lite docs)
    10. Source Code Control Extensibility
    11. Testing Solutions and Testing Extensibility
    12. Data Designer Extensibility
    13. System Definition Model (SDM) Extensibility
    14. Solution Deployment
    15. Team Foundation Server (TFS) Extensibility
    16. Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA)
    17. Domain-Specific Language (DSL) Tools
  3. Is there anything in the Visual Studio 2005 Help or Visual Studio 2005 SDK Help that you really like and you want us to continue investing our time in for future Visual Studio versions?
  4. If you could see just *one* thing added to, changed, or removed from the Visual Studio documentation or Visual Studio SDK documentation, what would it be?

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2006
    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.



  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2006
    Can I comment on the new help viewer?

    It seems to take an age to load up compared with the viewer that came with 2003.
  • Anonymous
    September 05, 2006
    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.