OSS @Microsoft - Docs

By -
Open source software (OSS) at Microsoft allows everyone to see, comment, and contribute to the products, services, documentation, sample code, and SDKs they use. I work at Microsoft and my opinions are my own.

The Microsoft documentation set is not a single GitHub repository. It is many repositories, all with active writers, support engineers, and SLAs.

When you see an issue in the docs or you think a concept or technique is unclear, GitHub repositories allow you to:

  • Add an issue, via an Edit button, that is sent directly to the Product group or Content Developer. 
  • Create a pull request (PR), that is sent directly to the Product group or Content Developer. 


Is this open source though? Absolutely. You can immediately impact all users of the docs in a positive way.

2 things you can do when logging an issue against the docs:

  1. Be specific. Your comment is attached to the entire doc. Be specific where in the doc the issue is and what wording, image, or sample code is problematic. 
  2. Be available. Some times an issue is deeper than a simple fix. If someone has a followup question, respond with information if you have it. 


Can you make the fix via a pull request? Yes. That speeds up the process.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yet once more into the breech (of altered programming logic)

By -
Once upon a time, long long ago, I wrote 8-bit programs in Tiny-C with absolute addressing being the only reality.  Then we had Borland Turbo-C with relative addresses and the joys of relative assembly jumps. Enter Windows and the joys of locking and unlocking memory blocks that you must allocated and manage yourself. Then came Visual Basic which evolved into .Net CLR and decreasing awareness of what is happening under the hood.   With VS2010 including F# and enhanced parallelism in .Net4, we actually have to go retro a bit – back to the world of having to understand the hardware. CPU speeds are no longer increasing – I have an old laptop from six+ years ago that ran at 3.2 GHz. This year I updated one of my machines off-the-shelf from Costco.com, an I7-920 with 4 cores and hyper-threading (8 CPUs appears in Task Manager) and 12 GB of DDR3 RAM. This week I ordered from Costco a Phenom II X6 (Yes – 6 REAL CORES) for one of my daughters.  This CPU will (according to YouTube demos) o
Read more

Simple WP7 Mango App for Background Tasks, Toast, and Tiles: Code Explanation

By -
Image
This is a continuation of this post , explaining how the sample app works. Caution : This sample isn’t meant as an example of best patterns and practices. If you see something in the code you would never do, then don’t. Solution File Organization The app has three Visual Studio Projects: the app, the agent, and the shared code library between them. One of the great things about Mango is that now the built-in Visual Studio Unit test functionality is available. By separating out the meat of the work into the SampleShared project, I can also focus my unit testing there. SampleApp1 The app has a MainPage, a ViewModel, and the WMAppManifest.xml file modified to note my ExtendedTask of BackgroundServiceAgent. The Agent is extremely simple with a call to the shared library, an update to the Tile, and a call to pop up Toast. The meat of the work is in the SampleShared library. The AgentMgr manages the background agent : add, remove, find, run now. It is only called f
Read more

How to convert SVG data to a Png Image file Using InkScape

By -
Image
Introduction The project required the need to put the visual pie chart on a web page on the client and in a Pdf file created on the server. I eventually choose to use a Telerik Kendo DataViz Chart control on the client, and use a PNG file on the server for the Pdf file. This blog post will explain the process and code to convert the client-side pie chart Svg data to a Png file, and provide a download to the working code. Prerequisites You need to have a trial version of the Telerik Kendo library installed in order to make the sample code work. You also need InkScape installed. InkScape is the application that does the actual conversion. You will need to change the Web.config appSetting of “ExeDirectoryForInkscape” to represent your own installation location. Any SVG Data Will Work The pie chart was created using the Telerik Kendo DataViz chart control. While I name a specific control, as long as you have access to the SVG data, the same conversion process on the server will
Read more