A reader wrote to me today saying (paraphrased)
…let you know that the PDF version of the Data Binding tutorial identifies itself as tutorial #3 when it should be #2. As result of past experiences with Microsoft I tend to take such things as a sign of the quality control that’s been applied to the content as well – and steer clear as a result!
Here was my response (abridged to the parts that may be of common interest)
Thanks for letting me know, we'll fix that ASAP
Each tutorial was sent out to 10+ developers on the Silverlight developer team and 200+ field reps before publication. I’m pretty confident that (nearly) all technical error were caught, but remember that for none of these people is reviewing my tutorial their day job. Worse, they all know large numbers of people are seeing the tutorial, so there is the Kitty Genovese effect.
In any case, I believe the tutorials are technically very accurate, and I’m supplementing them in my blog, — but they are definitely targeted at early adopters (after all, we are in Beta 1).
If you are more comfortable with a higher degree of editing, which is perfectly reasonable, you may want to wait a few months for one of the published books on Silverlight 2, such as my forthcoming Programming Silverlight 2 which Tim Heuer and I are writing for O'Reilly, and which will be subject to O'Reilly’s usual rigorous editing standards (though I’ve never seen a book without some errata).
In any case, thanks.
The bottom line, for me, is that we have a responsibility to put out highly accurate information, but the reality is that we are working with a very large, complex framework that is changing rapidly. Please do let us know if you see anything you suspect is wrong (the forums are a great place for reporting such things) and we'll try to sort out whether it is operator error, an error in the tutorial or a bug in the framework.
Thanks!
