Many of you have complained in the past about the quality of the Civil 3D API documentation, and I cannot agree more with all your comments. Writing good documentation is very difficult; especially, when there is such a diverse audience with different wants and needs. It helps to understand what the main pain points are to concentrate efforts and improve the quality over time.
I need your help to understand what type of things we need to do to improve our documentation. I am sure we are doing some things right, but I would like to understand better what we are doing wrong.
If you have a few minutes, use the comments area to send me a couple of things that you will really like to see improved in the API documentation. Do we need more how-to articles? Do we need more code samples? Do we need to improve search and navigation? Anything that is causing you pain, we want to hear about it. I cannot guarantee that everything will be addressed, but we will make a big effort to address the most important things.
Thanks in advance.
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Isaac
Not sure if its just me or not but with the online help. I think you need a section called using the help that explains what all the icon pictures mean i.e this is a property this is a method, and an example on how to navigate to find something.
For example I wanted to know if any new methods had been added to intersections.
How do you bore down to the intersection object and get a listing of its properties?
I had to figure it out by clicking here and there it took a while to get to the information I wanted to know. But now I know the process I will be faster the second time around.
Also you find the odd typo when properties are read only and you can not actually set them you need a comment on this page type button so someone can fix it easily.
Posted by: Justin Ralston | 09/28/2011 at 04:20 PM
I would like to see more examples, not the basic things but also more complex examples.
Further there is not one place where to find information which API is available in which AutoCAD or Civil3D version, and which options are not available yet (like extracting borders from Surfaces)
Thanks anyway for all your information about the Surface API, it helped me a lot.
Posted by: A. Huizinga | 09/29/2011 at 01:41 AM
I completely agree with more medium to complex samples. The C3D Developer's Guide is OK in that it covers a few things superficially, but I think I've only actually found one of the samples provided useful. They somehow manage to always fall short of being helpful for me.
I've found the few samples you've provided on this blog to be much more helpful. Kean's blog has been endlessly useful too (for AutoCAD) as his examples tend to work toward a useful goal.
Subassemblies are another great example. All the code is open (unfortunately it's VB.net but I'll take what I can get) and not always well documented, but I've always managed to create/modify the subassemblies I've needed. The times where I've been stuck were usually my fault. Now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever actually looked at the API reference for subassemblies.
Posted by: TimStalin | 10/01/2011 at 08:41 PM
Definitely examples on how the methods and properties are accessed. Sometimes it can be a bit confusing on what the programmer intended the object being passed should be. A diagram of the object model would be nice for the Civil 3D .NET API.
Posted by: Christopher Fugitt | 10/02/2011 at 04:49 PM