How to understand MSDN documentation? [closed]

Question

When I used to use VB 6 in my high school MSDN was just fantastic, I never looked anywhere else for help. Then came .NET and online MSDN and whatnot, and there were no longer any practical examples of anything. I slowly started to avoid MSDN and now when I search something on Google I straight away add -msdn in there.

If you take a simple example of ArrayList count there is nothing mentioning that count has to be used like this:

ArrayList tmpArray = new ArrayList();
tmpArray.Add("something");
LabelCount.text = tmpArray.Count;

The way MSDN has it is actually really helpful if you have a basic idea of what member variables are etc. But if you are new to C# in general, you would be completely lost.

PHP documentation is so neat! A simple strlen has a neat depiction of what are the return values, parameters for function etc, plus the comment section has lots of users giving out so many valuable usage example of strlen which I find really amazingly relevant and helpful.

Is there a way to look at things and understand in MSDN? How do you guys refer MSDN?

Answer 1

Microsoft's documentation does not have the beauty and simplicity that linux man or info has, but still, it's very comprehensive. You need to know that it's not tutorials in most cases, it's reference documentation, that assumes you already know how to use that function.