I was reading an article about the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern when I noticed a comment which sparked my rage against an all-too-common pattern I've observed in recent years:
If you're doing WPF development, you really need to check out Dan Crevier's series on DataModel-View-ViewModel. Right now there is no easy way to read through all his posts on the subject without navigating through them using the calendar control on his blog.
With the prevalence of increasingly easier blog services like Blogger or Wordpress, anyone can be a publisher. Unfortunately some have used these services (with little additional customization) for purposes they are not well-suited for. While we may likely contradict this post at some time in the future, I'd like to express my increasing annoyance with blogs that post coding tutorials. A blog is a much-less-than-ideal medium for hosting coding tutorials.
Why?
For one, when I'm looking for coding tutorials, I want them categorized. I want to be able to easily sort through XNA Game Studio SpriteBatch tutorials or WPF TabControl tutorials. With blogs, your posts are time-based. They are generally consumed in much the same way a newspaper or magazine is; you don't often reach for an old issue of a magazine or a newspaper from a few months or years ago. You use them to get recent information about topics of interest. Blogs are designed around this assumption as well.
Now admittedly, a blog is orders of magnitude better for retrieving archived information, but the filtering mechanism is still subpar. The best that you can reasonably hope is that the blog author applied an extensive and thorough use of tags, which certainly isn't something you can count on, and is often completely arbitrary. (I can write an entire article about the problems with the hacky "tags" system so prevalent these days. In fact, I'm struggling to come up with an adequate set of tags for this post.)
Instead, developers should separate their tutorials and their blog posts. Perhaps services like Blogger should (if they don't already) easily facilitate categorized articles. Google seems to be on to something with their Knol system, but I imagine there's a better way. Speaking of Google, it seems that currently most tutorials are found by searching for a particular topic, and trusting that relevant archived developer blog entries will appear in the search results. Thankfully, Google tends to pick up the slack where the blogging system falls short. But it shouldn't have to be this way.
