[Mono-docs-list] Re: msdn-browser/monodoc intergration

[Rafael Ferreira]

My 2 cents:

I agree 100% with Ben. The MSDN documentation is available and it is
better than what we current can offer, period. Giving developers the
best dev environment is the end goal here so making them jump through
hoops to get to msdn is silly. As I've said before, embedding Ben's
browser into a tab in monodoc (thus making the differentiation between
doc sources clear to the user) if pretty doable and I would be willing
to give it a try *if* Miguel gave the OK so I don't waste my time in a
hack that would never see the light of day. 


- raf

On Sat, 2005-09-24 at 11:42 -0400, Ben Maurer wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-09-24 at 11:25 +0200, Mario Sopena wrote:
> > 2005/9/24, Ben Maurer <bmaurer at andrew.cmu.edu>:
> > > get some idea of what it does. So why not make this process easier, by
> > > providing them a usable interface (IE, a treeview that doesn't suck in
> > > firefox)?
> > The reason are what Joshua already said. If the user has a great doc
> > (msdn) at hand, they will just move to look there and not to use mono
> > docs, because what they care is having a good doc and not where that
> > doc come from (well, most part of the users). But that is just my
> > opinion.
> 
> If the user is not willing to deal with the fact that our classlib docs
> has mostly stubs, they are going to end up using another documentation
> browser. For example, I usually use terminal server to a Windows
> computer to look up docs because I can use the .net doc browser.
> 
> Now, lets say we integrate an msdn viewer. This will make it easy to get
> to the "good" docs. Thus, we will increase the use of monodoc. This has
> a huge side benefit: since people are inside monodoc, they can easily
> write docs for stubbed methods. We could even play on this fact; we
> could put a message on top of the msdn page for each member we have
> stubs "Mono's free documentation only has stubs for this method. Help us
> out by writing docs". We'd have to be careful not to encourge plagiarism
> with this, but I think it could help us rather than hurt us.
> 
> I'd also like to remind you that most monodoc users (I'd guess upwards
> of 90%) do not contribute to the documentation, and there is almost
> nothing we can do to get them to do so (except maybe a bribe^Wcontest).
> not including a way to get to the msdn docs is just making their life
> harder, with no benefit to us.
> 
> -- Ben
> 
> 
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