this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
254 points (98.5% liked)

Programming

19952 readers
393 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ChairmanMeow -1 points 16 hours ago

Also it's not a single line - when looking at the source file - and a complete section instead.

True, I misjudged the original screenshot at the top of the thread. Still, it is all the way at the bottom of the page.

  1. It's inside the dotnet Docs. dotnet has nothing to do with an IDE. You can code/run dotnet code in any editor or terminal if you like.
  2. This person assumes that Visual Studio is the only IDE for dotnet. Looks like they never heard of Rider or VS Code or anything else.

This seems a bit harsh. The dotnet docs have tons of examples where it's shown how to do something in VS Studio or VSCode. "How to use dotnet feature X in product Y" doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing to include in your docs, especially with Microsoft having developed both.

WTF is he defining as an ad? "Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service". The whole section is bascially "Hey you can use Copilot to do this" - that's an ad right there.

Again I think you're being too harsh here. Not every mention of a product is necessarily an ad. The dotnet docs aren't an ad for dotnet for example. Given that this section is at the bottom of the page, doesn't demand any attention from the user and doesn't really seem like a direction for the user to start using Copilot, I find it hard to really consider it a proper advertisement. It's not saying "Hey you can use Copilot to do this", it's saying "If you want to use this with Copilot, here's how to do so". It makes no effort in convincing the reader that they should use Copilot, it's just instructions for those who already do use it.

There's also plenty of other places where the dotnet docs refer to non-dotnet products, e.g. this page on deep learning: https://github.com/dotnet/docs/blob/main/docs/machine-learning/deep-learning-overview.md

It mentions other products like Tensorflow and ONNX there. Are these mentions also ads?

  1. A deployment target is not the same as "AI"
  2. If a page/section is not named like "How to deploy example app to Azure" then it shouldn't contain any reference to Azure. And yes you should complain about such stuff if it exists.

Plenty of the how-to guides end with "and here's how to deploy your stuff to Azure!". The dotnet docs even have an entire section on Azure, a service that has very little if nothing to do with how dotnet works. But it's still mentioned and documented in the dotnet docs, because it can be useful information for dotnet developers.

That's basically what the whole issue is about. WTF are you even talking about then? Just shut up and give an upvote.

They're referring to how they don't find it useful info, but other people who do use Copilot more intensively might find it useful. It's also a completely different point: the creator of the issue objects to the docs section because they consider it an ad for Copilot. The comment author disagrees, but says they'd rather see it removed because it's just not that useful information, though acknowledging that they might not be the target audience. It's a different argument that does contribute to the discussion imo.