Stuck on a coding problem – should you Bing it?

Coding is easy

The first bit is easy. The hard bit is the second bit, eliminating the user who doesn't know the work around.

If you insist on using it in headlines, can't you at least put "Bing it" in nice sanitary quotes where it belongs?

It looks like you're writing a program...

Would you like help?

Dam that an excellent idea 20 years a developer and never though of Goggling of coding problem lol

(sarcasm)

ASP.NET Forums

Looking at some of the messages on ASP.NET forum in MVC section, Bing will not only need to help them out but write the entire application for them.

I wonder

If all this back end searching using Bing is going to inflate Bing's usage numbers.....

One way to make it look like Bing is not a total failure.

Opportunity cost?

Perhaps the scariest thing about this feature is that it got the green light from Microsoft's management to develop in the first place. Is Visual Studio really so good that this kind of inane crap is all that is left to add? Er, "no, not even close" would, I suspect, be the answer from just about everyone who has to use VS.

Maybe if they made decent and accurate documentation you wouldn't need to use a search engine all the time?

Or perhaps this is for the copy+paste "programmers" that VS seems to now be targeting.

"if the IDE should encourage best practice, perhaps the current approach is misconceived"

It's pretty rare that the answer to any real problem that I've had comes from just taking the first answer and pasting it into a program. Usually, I need to read several sources to get the context of the problem and then come up with a variation on it with my own solution.

As for Stack Exchange/Overflow, I often see the wrong answer promoted to the top because someone is repeating something which is popular, but either out of date or not appropriate to the question at hand, or simply wrong. Another problem is that the moderators often won't allow answers which say that the person is asking the wrong question and they need to take a different approach to the broader problem. Instead you are supposed to focus on just that narrow problem rather than offer genuine guidance when someone has gone off the track.

And as to Microsoft's own web based documentation, don't get me started on that. I can't comment on their C# stuff, but their C documentation is abysmal compared to pretty much every other source out there. I'm working on a cross platform C library, so I've had a very good exposure to how their documentation compares to those of other C compilers.

Good idea... but...

"Maybe if they made decent and accurate documentation you wouldn't need to use a search engine all the time?"

This... first, I do want to say I actually like the idea of what they are doing here. When you do have to look for some sample code, it would indeed be nicer to have it in the IDE than having to switch between IDE and browser.

That said.... Switching back and forth between Linux, Windows, and Android programming...

The typical libraries on a Linux system (GTK, SDL, C library, X, XML lib if you're doing that, and so on) have reasonably good documentation, and usually code snippets that actually follow recommended programming practices. There's generally one particular library (with a fairly stable API over the course of a decade or more) to get any particular job done (although other libs may exist, they won't be installed by default, and it'll be pretty clear looking online which lib to use if your goal is to program for a "stock" system.) There still *is* Google pulling up snippets on stackoverflow etc. if you need it, but you may actually not need it.

Android, the whole API is there; not good code samples but honestly most of the API is quite straightforward -- including what API version a given call was introduced, if it was deprecated and if so what API version it was deprecated (and there's a table mapping API version to version of Android.) There's a chance that you may not have to google anything. I wrote one app without googling a thing, and a second app I only had to look up something (undocumented) on handling the status bar.

Windows? There's certainly extensive docs, but the APIs (for most functions) seem overcomplicated, no indication of what the recommended way is to use these APIs, and usually mutliple APIs with no indication on even *which* API to use (sometimes Microsoft deprecates one, but programmers find the replacement inadequate and say "don't use the replacement, use the deprecated one"). Sometimes, Microsoft has just left docs online, no header or footer to indicate "this is no longer up to date", I'll be reading up on something just to realize "Hey, this is from 2008, and this API has already been replaced twice since then." And, there'll be a high-level API that covers like 90% of functionality, then you've got to dig down to a lower-level API to do the rest -- not for unusual actions but for actions that every user of the APi wants to perform. In a few cases, I find they reimplemented some functionality (usually fixing bugs and speeding it up) but, despite the same functionality (or a superset of the old functionality), same inputs, and same outputs, the API calls will all be different (I think because they just had someone write the new API from scratch and it simply didn't occur to them to make it compatible with the old one.) It's honestly confusing as all hell. And, unfortunately, I've found plenty of code on stackoverflow, etc., that although it may have worked, appeared even at a glance to be quite fragile (for example, a snippet to print a temporary PDF file that would pause 1 second and just *assume* the print job had finished (deleting the temp file), instead of actually CHECKING if the print job had finished first.)