Learn from nonexamples

I think that content at Microsoft has gotten better over the years at providing examples. Examples are a good thing. What we still tend to overlook are nonexamples.

Nonexamples can be as effective, or even more effective, for learning. They provide an extra dimension that adds depth to a concept. Granted, they might be rather obvious in some circumstances...

"A protection group member is a data source within a protection group. For example, you add volume D:\ on server FS01 to a protection group, so volume D:\ is a protection group member. You did not add volume F:\ to a protection group, so volume F:\ is not a protection group member."

That concept just didn't need a nonexample to make its point. How scheduled consistency checks work did, and it worked itself neatly into the middle of the example:

"For example, on Sunday, you modify your protection group options to schedule a daily consistency check. From Sunday to Wednesday, data protection jobs are successfully completed and all replicas are successfully synchronized. Even though a daily consistency check is scheduled, it does not run because all replicas are consistent. Then, on Thursday, a large number of new files are copied to a protected file server and the synchronization log on the file server runs out of space. The next regular synchronization fails, DPM generates a "replica is inconsistent" alert, and the affected replicas are marked as inconsistent. Because you have scheduled a consistency check, DPM performs the consistency check at the scheduled time and repairs the replicas."

An example of making a point by using only nonexamples is Some Basic Guidelines on Writing Well at Miss Snark's.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Matthew Stibbe's review of the Bullfighter add-on for Word and PowerPoint intrigued me enough to try...