Team Foundation Server SDK question

vstsuetb

If you know about Team Foundation Server, then you might know there is an Extensibility Kit that ships as part of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK. I am Francis Langlois, the lead technical writer for the Team Foundation Server SDK, which is under development. In the Team Foundation Server SDK, we will take parts of the Extensibility Kit and expand on it.

The Visual Studio Team Foundation Server SDK includes documentation and samples to help develop products that integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server. You might use the Team Foundation Server SDK to build add-ins and integration components that ease your transition to Team Foundation Server. Or, you might be a developer tools vendor, an independent software vendor (ISV), or another type of solution provider.

My question to the user community is this: What do you want in an SDK? Specifically, what do want from the code samples? SDKs tend to ship code samples that follow one of two models. We’ll call them: The Whole Enchilada and Crawl/Walk/Run.

The Whole Enchilada

This is one big sample that is comprehensive. Sometimes, it’s called an end-to-end sample. This is the idea that we can show you how everything works by building one big sample that does a little of everything and exercises the API fully. You can then make your sample like this one.

Crawl/Walk/Run

This is more the approach of first making a simple (crawling) sample (for example, hello, world). Next, we add a little more complexity (walking, for example, I/O + algorithm + data structure sample. Then, we give you an even more complex (running) sample, adding layers until you are extrapolating from the sample and creating as you see fit.

Which of these suits you?

Francis X. Langlois
Team System Documentation – Microsoft Developer Division

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