Dare Obasanjo, on my comments, decries the "blog mania" that's going through Microsoft right now. (He works at Microsoft himself, and he too has a blog). He thinks Chris Brumme would be better served by posting his stuff up on MSDN.
I see it another way. Publishing is too hard for many Microsoft employees. Blogging makes it easy. Would Chris even bother if he needed to figure out who was responsible for publishing stuff like his over at MSDN? Would Chris bother if he needed to have three meetings just to get his stuff approved to post up? I wouldn't. Note: I'm not gonna publish on microsoft.com or msdn.com unless I have to. The process is just too daunting and I already have Chris Brumme beat since I know Chris Sells, Sara Williams, and others at MSDN. Think that most of Microsoft's 55,000 employees know how to get something through the publishing system at MSDN? I don't think so. Blogs take up the slack.
Put it another way. Would I rather have Chris Brumme spend an hour working on .NET architecture for Longhorn, or would I rather have him in an hour of meetings with MSDN trying to talk them into posting his stuff?
[The Scobleizer Weblog]
The danger of weblogs - Scoble works for MS and here he is washing MS dirty linen in public:
... Would I rather have Chris Brumme spend an hour working on .NET architecture for Longhorn, or would I rather have him in an hour of meetings with MSDN trying to talk them into posting his stuff?...
Errr, as a stupid sap paying $1000s for MSDN subscription I would rather that a company the size of Microsoft SORTED ITSELF OUT - please explain to me why I should even have to answer the question of which I would rather he do? If the MSDN people are a pain in the butt, then management should sort them out.
The state of MS documentation has always been a disgrace and now we know why - the people who wrote the stuff can't be bothered to document it 'cos its too hard. Aaaawwww, bless. Interesting that whilst most coders hate doing documentation (the hard is writing it not getting it published), Chris Brumme is a rarity who seems to like writing, or thinking by writing.
There's an obvious way for MS/MSDN management to solve the 'problem' of stuff appearing on weblogs. If they are all so damn clever at MS, I'm sure they will work it out and justify the subscription price - or should we stop subscribing:
The only thing that gives me hope is that many people are moving to using Google for their documentation needs and once his PageRank gets high more of our users will be able to find such important fundamental information about the CLR [Dare Obasanjo]
The trouble for me is that the API surface I write against is documented neither on MSDN nor the Web - I spent my life in a haystack of needles looking for the right one to put the thread through.
posted at: 9:51:28 AM 
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