The Visual Studio Debugger on the Wikipedia
While searching for information about submarines for one of my sons, I ran across several really good articles on the Wikipedia. If you don't know what the Wikipedia is, take a look https://en.wikipedia.org. It's basically a free encyclopedia continually being updated by ... well, anyone and everyone... including me.
Though I had heard about the wiki and the wikipedia, I had yet to peruse it for any length of time. Much to my dismay, though the Visual Studio IDE had it's own page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio), almost nothing was posted concerning what I obviously consider its most important and powerful feature -- the debugger. To that end, I made some initial posts about it and its predecessor, CodeView.
Please feel free to take a look and edit-away to set me straight on details or other interesting info I may have easily missed. I'm especially concerned about the timing of the release of a debugger that was integrated with the editor rather than being standalone. You old-timers out there may have a better memory than me. See and edit it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Debugger.
Comments
- Anonymous
February 14, 2004
Wikipedia is an excellent resource and it is so impressive that it works so well with people contributing good content to it.
I've also used wikis before for creating living documentation on software projects, which is a great way to share information amongst a team.
Little plug: for more on wikis see an article on the CodeProject I wrote a little while ago:
http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/wiki.asp - Anonymous
February 14, 2004
Thanks for the article Jonathon, it's a great introduction to wiki's! As he mentions in the article his information is quite specific to a particular wiki implementation. You're mileage may vary depending on what wiki implementation you end up using.
I believe Wiki's are on the verge of taking over here internally. In Visual Studio we have moved many of our functional specs to a wiki rather than keeping them as Word documents. I have used it to document designs and coding rationalizations for the user-interface work I've done.
By putting it on a wiki, it becomes instantly avaiable to anybody at Microsoft, as long as they have a browser installed.
Additional advantages the wiki provides is a centralized location for documentation about anything, including work done outside the Visual Studio team.
Since our wiki implementation supports a history of changes, there is little danger of changes being lost or having an evil Program Manager sneak in a requirement without the developer knowing that it happened. :)
In my eyes, the benefits are numerous. So much so, that I'll just end this post here. I'd be interested in hearing about other's feelings about wiki's and how the've been beneficial or not.