“Hello! I am a developer. Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!) and I like working with Shoobababoo and occasionally kleptomitrons. I’ve gotten to work for Company1 doing Shoobaboo-ing code things and that’s what led me to the Snarfus. So, let’s dive in!
You don’t need to include it all. You just need to mention it as pre-requisite knowledge, and link to resources about it for those who don’t have that knowledge. See Creating MAUI UI’s in C#
Good documentation includes both. i.e. step-by-step guide, with explanations. See above.
All documentation should cater to all levels. See above.
For “all documentation” to “cater to all levels” it would have to explain to people “how do you use a keyboard” and everything from there upwards, because there are people at that level hence it’s part of “all levels”.
I mean the your own example of good documentation starts with an intro of “goals” saying:
For 99% of people almost all that is about as understandable as Greek (expect for Greek people, for whom it’s about as understandable as Chinese).
I mean, how many people out there in the whole World (non-IT people as illustrated in the actual article linked by the OP) do you think know what the hell is “Visual Studio”, “.Net”, “Multi-platform Application User Interface”, “template”, “C#”, “XAML”, “binding” (in this context).
I mean, if IT knowledge was a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 the greatest, you’re basically thinking it’s “catering to all levels” when an explanation for something that is level 8 knowledge (advanced programming) has a baseline required level of 7 (programming). I mean, throw this at somebody that “knows how to use Excel” which is maybe level 4 and they’ll be totally lost, much less somebody who only knows how to check their e-mail using a browser without even properly understanding the concept of "browser (like my father) which is maybe level 2 (he can actually use a mouse and keyboard, otherwise I would’ve said level 1).
I think you’re so way beyond the average person in your expertise in this domain that you don’t even begin to suspect just how little of our domain the average person knows compared to an mere programmer.
No it wouldn’t. You just link to resources about pre-requisite knowledge.
Nope. Exact same thing applies to all pre-requisite knowledge.
Now scroll down to the pre-requisite knowledge which has links to things explaining ALL of that.
Exact same number as there is people capable of clicking on the provided links about them in the pre-requisite knowledge section.
…until they read the links in the pre-requisite knowledge, and then they will understand all of it.
says person who didn’t even scroll past the introductory paragraph! 😂 You think people try to learn things by reading only the introductory paragraph?? 😂
And yet, weirdly, if you keep reading you’ll find it caters to people who know nothing about it 😂
Cool but nobody’s about to link to prerequisite information like typing on a keyboard. Same for math, a book focusing on integration isn’t going to say “read this book for the basics of addition btw”.
And why should one even cater to that? If a person is interested enough they can just… look up the things they don’t understand, that’s not exactly hard
they say to someone who does indeed link to all pre-requisite knowledge. 😂 You know some Tech people do indeed recommend doing a touch-typing course, right?
I’m a Maths teacher. You’ll find that Maths textbooks do indeed run through any pre-requisites for the topic. e.g. “We discussed back in Chapter 2…”.
Because it’s useless to a large chunk of your audience if you don’t.
No they just can’t, not when no information at all has been given on what this is so that you have something to search for. See Microsoft doco where they use TLA’s, don’t tell you what the TLA is short for, don’t link to any information about the TLA, and searching for “TLA” (since they’ve not told you what TLA is short for) fails to bring up any information about this thing they are talking about. Now the tutorial is completely useless to you because you have no idea what they’re talking about and can’t find anything about what they’re talking about. “Draw the rest of the owl”
It’s very hard when you have no search keywords at all to work with.
No, you’re not supposed to follow years of computer science courses in a university. A good tutotial will provide all prerequisite knowledge for you. Including high school.
I think your tutorial depends too much on your editor UI. It reminds me of those tutorials (often written by Microsoft) where the IDE has changed enough to break the tutorial. This made the tutorial completely useless, because none of them would explain what I actually needed: the magic thing their IDE did in terms of essentials (text files, basic commands), so I could reproduce the effect.
This is different in the unix world, which favors tool-agnostic approaches in terms of text files & basic commands. Even as tooling & technology changes, I can usually look up the meaning of the text & those commands to update them.
That’s the most important I think: not the answer itself, but where the answer comes from, so I can go back there when I need to.
You mean the UI which is specified in the pre-requisites, that UI? 😂 It’s not a bug, it’s a feature - no bloat from going through everything twice (once for VS, once for VS Code). That’s why it’s in the pre-requisites.
You know I needed to write this because Microsoft hasn’t written a tutorial for this topic, at all, right? That does remind me though, MAUI have changed the parameters for Grids - I better check that part of my tutorial is still valid.
It’s a bad one: if I’m unable to get that version of your IDE, the tutorial becomes useless. If it had stuck to programming essentials like the source code & configuration files, then it’d have enduring value as the reader could understand without unnecessary concealment of basic information dependent on an IDE.
Not implied: the tutorial would properly focus on the programming without IDE complications as it shows the files generated & dependencies linked. (eg, “I did this in my IDE: here’s what it did”.) The reader could in principle use any text editor. It’s not an IDE tutorial.
And you made another Microsoft-grade tutorial: that’s not a compliment.
No it doesn’t. Clicking on the link gives you the latest version, which obviously is above the minimum version.
Haven’t concealed anything - it’s there in the pre-requisites
I have many screenshots showing exactly that.
No they can’t. Several times I cover the Intellisense options which make it easy. This isn’t available in a text editor, hence the pre-requisite of using Visual Studio if you want to follow this blog.
It’s not meant to be. It covers what you need to know to do what I have done in the blog.
Nope! They don’t include pre-requisites at all, never mind links to them, never mind step-by-step processes with screenshots, etc.