Scott on Writing

Feedback

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/9/2004 9:31 PM Avonelle Lovhaug

I pretty much do what you do. I google for specific things I'm stuck on, subscribe to newsletters for a few sites (dotnetjunkies, sqljunkies, and a few others), and these days I'm also more likely to subscribe to an interesting blogger's feed than a feed from a site. I'm not subscribed to any listservs these days.

I agree that many of the developers I know don't actively seek content. In my mind, this is wrong, because reading stuff even if I don't need it yet helps me to remember it and find the answer more quickly. However, I'll admit it is easy to get distracted by all the information, so perhaps that is why some people avoid it.

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/9/2004 9:45 PM Jeff Key

I read MSDN Magazine cover to cover every month and always have the MSDN Library open on my machine. I don't read as many books as I used to, but that's really a function of me not having much time. In the past I'd subscribed to the DevelopMentor lists, but have since unsubbed to all of them. No time. Blogs have taken up all of my time and I still have 667 of THOSE flagged to read.

As for the hundreds of developer sites, I don't use any of them. I've found in the past that the quality just isn't there sometimes. (Some 3rd party sites are fantastic, some aren't. They just don't fit into how I do things.)

I think you have two kinds of people: Problem solvers and answer finders. If you're a problem solver, it's much easier to dissect what exactly is wrong or needs to be accomplished, whereas answer finders simply look for an answers instead of trying to _solve_ their problems. My gripe with said sites is that the solutions they provide aren't always what I would consider best practices and answer finders use these things w/o question, while at the same time developing bad habits.

The information provided my Microsoft is adequate the majority of time if you know what you're looking for. If I can't figure something out, I do hit Google groups. Only then am I very rarely directed to a 3rd party site.

Blogs: I don't know if I learn much from them, but that's probably due to the blogs I've chosen to subscribe to. YMMV.

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/9/2004 10:12 PM Brian Desmond

I rely mostly on the masses of banter I skim in my RSS reader every day or two, and google. I search the MSDN library, followed by the Platform SDK in particular, followed by Google, when I'm looking for how to do something.

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/9/2004 10:41 PM Scott Mitchell

Jeff, I find myself learning in a similar fashion: reading the docs often. I've also logged more hours using Reflector to see what's happening internally in the BCL than I'd care to admit. :-)

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/9/2004 10:42 PM Ryan VanderPol

I use NewsGator (www.newsgator.com) and have all my RSS feeds syndicated into Outlook 2003. So now, not only do I use Outlook to manage my email and my schedule, but now to read my news. NewsGator painlessly incorporates all the latest posts and notifies me when new articles have been published. My list of syndicated feeds includes: 4Guys, DotNetJunkies, MSDN, etc. as well as a few blogs, like yours.

This is all fine and dandy for as-it-comes news articles, but when I'm in need of a quick solution I find myself using Google or searching around ASP.NET specific sites or MSDN.

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/10/2004 1:56 AM Paul Bartlett

I subscribe to ~200 blog RSS feeds (mostly technical, though Dilbert is in there somewhere :), some of which are aggregated site feeds. I think that this is important as often you will know "an" answer to a problem (so would not be up against a brick wall and Googling), but were it for keeping current would not know several better ones.

BTW, Adam recently asked a similar question at: http://blogs.geekdojo.net/adam/archive/2004/02/09/897.aspx

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/10/2004 3:09 AM Darren Neimke

Scott, I can certainly relate to the comment about using Reflector; while building my upcoming ContextMenu control I spent hours using WinCV and Reflector to help get the job done.

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/10/2004 6:31 AM AndrewSeven

There are dozens of sites, and lots of articles, but most of them are bad.

Whatching the RSS feeds fly by lets me see "what happening" google-ing msdn lets me find just about anything I need.

Don't degrade the quality of your (top notch) content by aggregating mediocrity.

-Andrew
(the_origional_andrew from the messageboard)

# How Do I Find My Technical Information? 2/10/2004 7:20 AM Adam Kinney on .NET

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/10/2004 7:34 AM Dave Burke

Google for answers. Skim weblogs.asp.net aggregrate subjects in newsgator, Larkware News feed, Code Magazine is pretty great. Source code study like .text, nGallery and the app blocks. Rarely read technical books anymore. That's about it. Oh, I try to read most of Scott Mitchell's stuff. That guy knows what he's talking about!

# Interesting query on finding technical info from Scott Mitchell 2/10/2004 8:26 AM Dave Burke

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/10/2004 5:46 PM Jeff Key

Scott: Oh, right, how did I forget my beloved Reflector?! Same here, especially after he added the decompiler. Anakrino gave me much joy, but that really took me over the edge. Sadly, it can't even open WSE 2.0 TP, which I really need since most of the docs are empty. Oh well.

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/11/2004 1:19 PM Rob Williams

Much the same as the rest I guess. Google when the need arises, subscribe to a few newsletters (4guys among them you'll be pleased to hear Scott) and read a few blogs.

I use MSDN/.Net Framework SDK Documentation as a technical reference when I'm just looking for a specific bit of syntax or the like.

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/12/2004 2:53 PM Anders V.

Interesting topic. My own process of finding technical information is very similar to the replies above. The wast stream of weblogs is getting hard to consume. We at Thedotnet.com will try to filter out the less important/interesting blogs by user votes and admin selectivity. If you feel you can help - let us know.

# Accumulated links 2/14/2004 9:09 AM ISerializable

# Accumulated links 2/14/2004 9:46 AM ISerializable

# re: How Do You Find Your Technical Information? 2/14/2004 11:40 AM Greg Pyatt

Like many others, I subscribe to a large number of RSS feeds, but usually weblogs.asp.net is the one I enjoy most. Sadly there is no blogshares.com type website for developers, so I have to waste a lot of time subscribing, then reading the article titles. Every once in a while, I'll go through the RSS subscriptions I have in SharpReader and delete the ones that I never use. Honestly, the RSS aggregator should compile these statistics for me, and should make recommendations much like the desktop icon-managing function in WinXP. The RSS aggregator should also make recommendations based on what I like.

I too will echo the sentiment that RSS is like drinking from a firehose. I never knew why people complained so much about information overload until I started using RSS. And while I used to care a lot about learning Whidbey, the continuing flood of articles on an unreleased application is now only leaving me feel increasingly left in the dust. Sometimes information overload can feel like a weapon being pointed at you. Information on unreleased Whidbey is now crowding out time used to digest more relevant information.

Since I sit in front of a computer screen at work, my eyes get very tired by the end of the day. I will oftentimes run an interesting article through TextAloud and have it read to me, or save it to MP3 to listen to later. It works fine for wordy articles, but listening to a recital of code in a synthetic voice gets very difficult to follow. That may be because nobody reads code the way they read prose. We scan code, jumping from line to line and not reading straight through.

Google is obviously the best solution and has been for a long time. The only way RSS subscribed articles have an advantage is when describing coding strategies - the *how* or *why* to do something as opposed to the *what* to do. With the exception of distributing components via RSS, the source code is simply being cranked out far too fast to digest properly.

# CS101.NET 2/23/2004 4:35 PM Jeff Key

# Great Blog Content 3/8/2004 12:08 AM Scott on Writing

Title:
Name:
Url:
Enter the code you see:
Comments
Remember Me?