Things to do before posting!

Hi All
Now I see many people are posting in the forum, with out even looking for the information in MSDN or in Help. Most of the questions posted here are very easily found in the MSDN, but I still many are like that. I think now people doesnt want to bother themselves looking into the help. What I was figuring about the forums are that, only the questions that are not easily found in helps should be posted. That will make the forum an good treasure to find more intresting things, than to post the trivial question.
Before posting they dont even search in the forum, since i saw MANY questions are reapeated MANY times.
I dont know if you agreee with me, but I see the forum is flooded with such questions only.

I have the same feeling about this forum. Sometimes it seems that some people ask for solutions for their homeworks. People sould look for answers first from the MSDN help, this forum or other forums, and those very good examples posted on www.codeguru.com. I think as programmers we all like to help each other, but we don't like to be used if people just come here to ask for some free codes even not to try by themselves first.

Allen

I agree. There are many questions here where all that is needed is to search MSDN, search CodeGuru, a general web search like Altavista, or just look in a C++ book. For example, there have been a lot of questions concerning implementing edit controls that allow certain characters. A search on CodeGuru will turn up at least 4 or 5 code libraries that handle masked edit controls.

The laziness factor can be summed up with what happened here a few months ago:
There was a post from a person who was getting angry with the answers we were giving him, because "they didn't solve his problem". It was getting hostile, and a couple of us (including myself) just let him know that we are not the Microsoft technical staff. It turns out that the advice we gave him was indeed correct (we basically said to look for the article "Qwhatever" in MSDN). He was just too lazy to do the search himself, even when we gave him the article number! When one of us actually wrote out the answer for him, he was then satisfied!!

Regards,

Paul McKenzie

I am someone that has many, many, many times simply looked up the answer and given the reference to where I found the answer. I only do what the person could have done and should have done. I am hoping that the person gets the hint.

Sometimes people post code that anwers a question but the answer is also in the documentation and I think it is better to let the person go to the documentation when the documentation is sufficient.

How does it go: Give them a fish and they eat for a day; teach them to fish and they eat for a lifetime. Right?

Something else that is very frustrating are all the vague questions. Some people might think I ma being rude for asking for clarifiaction but it is not always clear to me whether it is best to simply ignore vague questions or if I should try to help by trying to explain that they need to put at least as much work into asking the question as they want us to put into the answer.

Hello guys,
Please take a look at a hand of yours. Is the length of its fingers the same or not the same? It seems to me that all the fingers of your hands have the same length. So your hands look terrible. The same are your personal opinions!

Not everyone has got MSDN; especially those doing programming for a hobby and not for a living...

Not everyone has got MSDN; especially those doing programming for a hobby and not for a living. Furthermore the syntaxes given in MSDN are often not clear for beginners.

Please do not discount beginners. If the question is vague, it could be for a reason. May be they deserve a more general opinion kind of answers. More patience and well meaning is required from all. There are areas (like COM, ActiveX, ATL) that are so foreign to me. On the other hand I feel alot better about MFC, printing, Doc/View. When I ask if MS ActiveX controls used in Html can be accessed by a Mac browser, to many of you it can not get any more trivial. But trust me, the answer is (as far as I can tell) is not staring me in the face.

It is true that everybody does not have MSDN. However for god's sake beginners should buy some books. But as I said sometimes nothing is better than a patient guru helping you out.

yalcin
[email protected]

(1) What is MSDN?
(2) Is this question dump? and shouldn't be asked ?

You have an ally. They are so arrogant with their handful of knowledge! They have to be more thoughtful and considerate.

Regards,

A used-to-be-a-fisherman SW programmer.

Are you foolin' me?

Gee, I thought this was a place to look for help, not get a lecture on how lazy I supposedly am.

True, but much MSDN info is also available online at http://msdn.microsft.com.

MSDN = Micrsoft Developer Network. It is a large collection of technical specs and articles about Windows, MFC and various Micrsoft APIs. You can subscribe and get quarterly CD shipments, and much of the information is also available online at http://msdn.microsoft.com. If you develop Windows apps for a living, then an MSDN subscription is a must.

No, it wasn't a dumb question.

I think the forums are fine the way they are. Sure, there's a lot of silly questions, even some people looking for homework answers. But people who do that will never get far in life anyway.

I would have loved to have had CodeGuru when I was teaching myself programming. Unfortunately, the web (at least as it exists today) didn't exist, and I instead picked up many bad habits and misconceptions from the BBS software code I had bought from WWIV (ahh, the good ole days).

re: Buying your tools, some people just can't affort programming books. Those things are damned expensive. I know there are programmers on this board that got their free copy of GNU or maybe some high-school-sanctioned free compiler and they're just hobbyists. In my experience, people who start out this way become the best programmers because they're tinkerers. We should encourage them, not tell them to take a class & buy a book.

There are also cultural differences. What may seem horribly unclear to you may be the best effort to a person who is not writing in his native language.

Finally, and this is the biggest point, I find as much joy in giving a good answer as I do in receiving one. We're a community here, and a rather large one at that. This is no time to start getting elitist. If somebody really bothers you, just don't reply to their posts. But what happens when you crush the spirit of somebody who's earnestly lost and needs help? Gotta act on faith sometimes.

All in all, I think things are fine the way they are. I'd much rather get lame or vague posts than no posts at all.