Fully Working Examples

[Tom]

By my estimate, greater than 90% of the online doco code does not work
without additional coding effort. Fully working solutions are
invaluable for the student. A guru's work measured in minutes can take
a newb ages to duplicate. Imagine the improved teaching efficiency of
being able to direct someone to a working solution! Gurus would not
have to teach the same lesson repeatedly and their work would be more
persistent.

A picture is worth 1,000 words and a working solution that teaches is
worth a million!

How can this need for more fully working solutions be met?

The help provided within this group is amazing. The brain power in
here is immense. The knowledge transfer efficiency is lacking because
there are an infinite number of ways for a newb to falter when
starting from blocks of code that are not fully functional.

The only explanation to this dilemma that I can fathom is the problem
of malicious code being included in solutions. Oh how the power of the
evil wins all to often!

[=?Utf-8?B?RmFtaWx5IFRyZWUgTWlrZQ==?=]

"Tom" wrote:

By my estimate, greater than 90% of the online doco code does not work
without additional coding effort. Fully working solutions are
invaluable for the student.

I would say that 99% of the online docs code does not work without addtional
coding effort to build a product. Keep in mind though, that is not the
purpose for the most part, of these types of docs. The docs are to show
examples of classes and methods, and how they are to be used. Its similar to
showing someone how to use a hammer and a nail, but not giving them details
to build a house versus a table.

[Stephany Young]

I certainly empathize with your frustration.

However, having first hand experience as a teacher, I can categorically
state that most students will, when presented with a fully-working example,
will tend to copy-and-paste the example without bothering to dissect the
example and understand what the code is actually 'doing'.

Certainly some, generally those who genuinely want to learn, do make the
effort to understand the code before attempting to use it.

It's a matter of finding the happy-medium, and the concept of you can't make
everyone happy all of the time comes into play.

Generally the purpose of an example is to point you in the right direction
rather than to hand you the answer on a plate. Unfortunately there are a lot
of examples that do neither.
"Tom" <Th********@earthlink.netwrote in message
news:9i********************************@4ax.com...

By my estimate, greater than 90% of the online doco code does not work
without additional coding effort. Fully working solutions are
invaluable for the student. A guru's work measured in minutes can take
a newb ages to duplicate. Imagine the improved teaching efficiency of
being able to direct someone to a working solution! Gurus would not
have to teach the same lesson repeatedly and their work would be more
persistent.

A picture is worth 1,000 words and a working solution that teaches is
worth a million!

How can this need for more fully working solutions be met?

The help provided within this group is amazing. The brain power in
here is immense. The knowledge transfer efficiency is lacking because
there are an infinite number of ways for a newb to falter when
starting from blocks of code that are not fully functional.

The only explanation to this dilemma that I can fathom is the problem
of malicious code being included in solutions. Oh how the power of the
evil wins all to often!

[BobF]

codeproject.com is your friend
"Stephany Young" <noone@localhostwrote in message
news:OE**************@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...

>I certainly empathize with your frustration.

However, having first hand experience as a teacher, I can categorically
state that most students will, when presented with a fully-working
example, will tend to copy-and-paste the example without bothering to
dissect the example and understand what the code is actually 'doing'.

Certainly some, generally those who genuinely want to learn, do make the
effort to understand the code before attempting to use it.

It's a matter of finding the happy-medium, and the concept of you can't
make everyone happy all of the time comes into play.

Generally the purpose of an example is to point you in the right direction
rather than to hand you the answer on a plate. Unfortunately there are a
lot of examples that do neither.
"Tom" <Th********@earthlink.netwrote in message
news:9i********************************@4ax.com...

>By my estimate, greater than 90% of the online doco code does not work
without additional coding effort. Fully working solutions are
invaluable for the student. A guru's work measured in minutes can take
a newb ages to duplicate. Imagine the improved teaching efficiency of
being able to direct someone to a working solution! Gurus would not
have to teach the same lesson repeatedly and their work would be more
persistent.

A picture is worth 1,000 words and a working solution that teaches is
worth a million!

How can this need for more fully working solutions be met?

The help provided within this group is amazing. The brain power in
here is immense. The knowledge transfer efficiency is lacking because
there are an infinite number of ways for a newb to falter when
starting from blocks of code that are not fully functional.

The only explanation to this dilemma that I can fathom is the problem
of malicious code being included in solutions. Oh how the power of the
evil wins all to often!

[Tom]

Bob >Thanks for the codeproject.com suggestion !!

I looked it over briefly and its a definite winner. I'll dig it plenty
for sure. :)

Some additional "Fully Working Examples" thoughts >>

For brevity and not getting lost in the forrest ... partial coding
snips do have purpose. A LOT of purpose. But do they really work? When
I try to implement them I get hours of frustration and very often NO
success. How discouraging!!

I suggest that the MS doco should snip all they want but ALWAYS give a
link to the complete and fully functional program than contains the
code. The smaller the better ... but provide a stable starting point
for us struggling to learn.

In the past 72 hours I've been struggling with two clips dealing with
binding and DataGridView. With help from Marc I managed to get
BindingList to work ... but IBindingList and DataTable are causing me
headaches. Heck, without Marc's help I'd still be stuck trying to get
List to work. Or maybe I'd have gone back and tried some more on
ArrayList? My point is this binding stuff is darn tricky and my texts
don't cover it very well. Seems the focus is on data base usage and
XML I/O. That's good stuff for sure. But there are needs for locally
generated data binding without the XML layer. IBindingList doco makes
it sound like the cat's meow for DataGridView ... but just give it a
try on a non well established database data format. If you have no
problems ... I salute you!! Even if you have database usage needs and
access to a database for learning purposes ... the examples in the
doco are incomplete. Thus you really know your stuff, or you are in
for some pain. :(

If you are coaching a football team ... don't you provide the play
book to the team members? Or do you tell them you have some good plays
and here's some of the aspects but I can't be bothered to show you all
the details? HA!! Give me a working starting point and let me learn by
experimenting. Please!!! No example program is going to meet my exact
needs ... so the fear of a student cutting and pasting without
studying the code seems a bit like an excuse for the way things are.
I'm not asking for a play book with every play ever conceived ... just
a reasonably solid set would be a tremendous improvement.

Here's a goal >90% of the snips linked to fully working solutions.
After all, somebody did test them? Right? Come on Coach MS ... don't
call two times outs on us again, everyone makes mistakes but we little
guys that can't afford enterprise level applications need better
support.

Whew, I vented ... but I don't feel the least bit better. I know my
struggles will continue and that many others are in the same boat.

Why post this noise of mine here you might ask? I feel it has just as
likely a chance to be heard here as anywhere. The voice of one is
weak. Take a poll on years of programming experience vs the doco
examples usefulness. The focus needs to shift a bit towards the entry
level. Maybe someday I won't be a newb? I'd still appreciate solid
working solutions for examples!

-- Tom

[Jon Skeet [C# MVP]]

BobF <rN***********@charter.netwrote:

codeproject.com is your friend

Well, partly. I've seen a lot of *really* dodgy examples on
CodeProject. The only sort of peer review is through comments, and
often there'll be a lot of people saying how it's exactly what is
required before you get to comments explaining how the sample is
critically flawed.

This isn't limited to CodeProject of course. For example, look at:
http://dotnet.org.za/deon/pages/2998.aspx

I happened to see this (can't remember why) and people had been pretty
confident in it, not spotting that the salt was being used in a
completely broken way.

Examples in books *tend* to be better because they have extensive peer
review before being published; full, active open source applications
which have been around for a while tend to be reasonable as well,
although it's far from always the case.

--
Jon Skeet - <sk***@pobox.com>
http://www.pobox.com/~skeet Blog: http://www.msmvps.com/jon.skeet
World class .NET training in the UK: http://iterativetraining.co.uk

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?=]

Tom wrote:

By my estimate, greater than 90% of the online doco code does not work
without additional coding effort. Fully working solutions are
invaluable for the student.

No. The purpose of example code is not to build and run the
code. The purpose of example code is to read the code. So
whether there are a Main to call the code is irrelevant.

Good examples are short and focus on the essential.

Arne

[Registered User]

On Thu, 06 Dec 2007 21:43:43 -0500, Arne Vajhøj <ar**@vajhoej.dk>
wrote:

>Tom wrote:

>By my estimate, greater than 90% of the online doco code does not work
without additional coding effort. Fully working solutions are
invaluable for the student.

No. The purpose of example code is not to build and run the
code. The purpose of example code is to read the code. So
whether there are a Main to call the code is irrelevant.

Good examples are short and focus on the essential.

I agree.The walkthroughs are excellent ways to learn and better
understand the topics.

regards
A.G.