The VS SDK, version 1.0 RTM

My team is feverishly working on a complete rework of the documentation for this release. We've even borrowed writers and editors from three other teams. The goal is to simplify the docs and provide clever ways to streamline discoverability. The dev team has been reworking the samples to make them better, nicer, and more usable. For example the VS Package sample was reduced from 1800 lines of to ~200. Now the thirty topics discussing the sample need to be reworked.

Because my team has consisted of a few good people and a steady stream of contractors over the last five years, we have been weeding out some content of dubious quality. When I first came to the job I was working towards an eighty percent solution. Get eighty percent of the stuff documented to an 80% completion state. I kept hoping that reinforcements would show up and we would really rework the docs. But that never happened.

So going forward, I will try to only complete the materials for that which is complete in the SDK and according to the staff that I have available. I waffle back and forth with this concept because I know our readers have always been ISVs, professional developers with major companies. But now we have intermediate developers, students, and hobbyists joining our ranks. Documentation for readers at that level need a lot more basic instruction.

BTW, key people in our org (PM Phil Taylor, Dev Lead Allen Denver, Architect Douglas Hodges, etc.) are at the PDC this week. I listened to BillG's keynote this morning and actually was impressed with the demos that I was able to see. Vista and Office improvements abound. I love that feature where you assign an e-mail to your task list for next week with a click of a mouse. Of course, Channel 9 is posting videos of the important events.