.NET Tips and Tricks

Blog archive

Aspose.Pdf: Documentation Done Right

I spend so much time talking about how I feel let down by the documentation provided with the software that I review that it would be churlish not to comment on a company that does it right. So here it is:

Aspose.Pdf does it right.

I reviewed Aspose.Pdf for the September issue of Visual Studio Magazine, and one thing that impressed me was the product's documentation and help. Aspose provides a Help file that breaks down into two main sections. First, there is a Getting Started section that provides an overview of the package and what it does. The very first sentence provides what's often missing in these packages: a succinct description of what the product does in terms of "why you'd want to use it":

Aspose.Pdf for .NET is a .NET Component built to ease the job of developers to create PDF documents ranging from simple to complex on the fly programmatically.

The second section is a programmer's guide that provides detailed information on using Aspose. This section is in several parts. The first sections are introductions that assume you're not familiar with the basic technologies used by the package and provide essential background information. You're free to skip over these sections, of course, if you are familiar with the information.

The next part section is "scenario based:" it walks a developer through the basics of creating a "Hello, World" application with Aspose.PDF. This would probably be where most programmers would get started -- skipping the background material to see if they can get something working.

Aspose.PDF is smart enough to continue in that mode, organizing the information in the next few parts around typical scenarios. Rather than dumping the reader into an alphabetical list of classes and methods, information is organized by what developers would want to do: "Working with Sections," "Working with Images" and so on.

Aspose.Pdf has recognized that the typical developer question when starting to work with a product is not, "How do I use this class?" Instead, most developers want to ask the question, "How do I accomplish this task?" These parts don't consist of a hunk of code that you have to figure out. Instead, you get an overview of what the solution looks like, followed by the code you need.

Once you've gotten up to speed in Aspose.Pdf and have moved on to the point where you are asking "How do I use class ???', there's a an API reference that answers those questions.

It's just nice to see documentation done right. And darned unusual, also.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 10/08/2010


comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • GitHub Previews Agentic AI in VS Code Copilot

    GitHub announced a raft of improvements to its Copilot AI in the Visual Studio Code editor, including a new "agent mode" in preview that lets developers use the AI technology to write code faster and more accurately.

  • Copilot Engineering in the Cloud with Azure and GitHub

    Who better to lead a full-day deep dive into this tech than two experts from GitHub, which introduced the original "AI pair programmer" and spawned the ubiquitous Copilot moniker?

  • Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

    Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.

  • Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.

  • As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

    While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events