[Partial Rant] - A sick cyclic redundancy when providing answers to questions, versus questions asked...
Being a couple of years now after the public release of .NET, I have to say there is a great deal of literature out there on the operation of almost every section of the namespace tree. If you can find it in the docs, someone has written about it now using more detail than the docs would ever dare to encompass. That would lead me to believe that a large amount of information is readily available to answer, say 90% of all questions, or at least 90% of all basic questions.
Something like “How do I turn a string into an enum value?”, becomes what I would call a question of the day. Has it been well answered? Yes it has, and in excruciating detail. However, people still tend to use switch statements to convert between strings and enums. They also tend to lose a grasp of where to find the answer to the original question. You see, the more information thrown out there, the deeper the search hierarchy becomes. Also, the older items get in search engines, the less likely they are to be returned at the top of result sets. The less people search for given data, the same trend applies. So let's look at how a natural progression of Q&A might happen for converting string values to an enum might go!
PDC, Q: How do I quickly convert strings to enums?
PDC, A: The QuickStarts have a sample of that. Go look it up.
Betas, Q&A: The QuickStarts still have a sample of that. Go look it up.
V1 Release, Q&A: Many newsgroup postings have this answer now. As do several code sample sites. Go look it up.
Today, Q&A: Blog - Hey, I just discovered this awesome feature of an enums that everyone should know about.
I'm not trying to fight the natural progression of things, however, almost every question you can come up with has been answered at some point and is documented out there in the wild. People continue to blindly post questions, that have relavent answers available, and people continue to quickly answer those questions with a quickly typed response, completely ignoring all of the various in-depth study and resources available to answer the same question. Eventually, the waters get so muddied again, that the research has to be refactored by a new individual and reposted to yet again demonstrate the power and feature set of available methods. The cyclic redundancy in this help system is amazingly sick to me. While I groan every time someone posts a repeated answer (the groan having direct proportion in size to the last time I actually saw the answer given) I have to admit to myself that maybe this will be the answer that staves off the next 50 questions because it now gains time precedence and becomes easy to search for again.
It occurs to me that modern day help systems don't account for refinements made after a product has shipped. They don't take into account the immense processing power of the aftermarket to help improve the central help system and instead rely on various community support features and community linking. Since I'm not a help system guy, but I know someone who is I'll just point you to their blog. Go check out Hari Sekhar's blog and comment on every post he makes with meaningful responses to ensure future help systems try to incorporate community samples/articles/information in an attempt to stop me from groaning (my doctor says that it is bad for me).