Contributing to the Microsoft ASP.NET Documentation My experience of writing for docs.microsoft.com

Back in February I spotted an issue on the ASP.NET Core Docs repository. The issue was a requirement for new documentation about the IHttpClientFactory feature being added in ASP.NET Core 2.1.

I’d been following the work on IHttpClientFactory for a while and had written a couple of posts about the functionality based on the nightly builds. I’d been keen to try my hand at helping with the docs.microsoft.com site for a while and this seemed like a great chance to contribute. In this post I’ll wanted to share my experience.

What is docs.microsoft.com?

Before I go further I should explain what docs.microsoft.com is. It’s Microsoft’s new (introduced in 2016) documentation portal, built from the ground up as a replacement for a number of prior documentation sites such as TechNet and MSDN. I believe it started with documentation for .NET Core / ASP.NET Core and has quickly grown to include documentation for many other Microsoft products and services.

One of the exciting and interesting changes is that many of the product teams have made their documentation open source. This allows members of the community to submit content and correct any mistakes they find. With more rapidly evolving products, keeping up is a real challenge. Allowing the community to assist is a great move and I believe has really improved the quality and usefulness of the content.

Additionally, an amazing team of managers and content writers has been assembled at Microsoft to build and maintain the improved documentation.

Getting Involved

So, back to my experience!

The first step was to show an interest and reach out to offer my contribution. I did this by commenting on the GitHub issue for the feature.

Scott Addie, a senior content developer at Microsoft who works on the ASP.NET docs team quickly responded to take up my offer. At this point we started to outline the content in collaboration with Ryan and Glenn from the ASP.NET team. You can follow that part of the story in the issue comments.

Once the plan and outline was agreed I was free to start work on the content.

Documentation

To get started, all I needed to do was to fork and clone the repository on GitHub. If those concepts are new to you, check out my YouTube playlist for some introductory videos on how that process works.

With the docs content on my machine I started a branch and begin outlining some content. All of the documentation is written in markdown. I prefer to use Visual Studio Code for markdown editing so I opened it up and created a document.

I began in the same was as I do for my blog posts, by outlining some initial sections and jotting down some notes. I like to organise my plan early on as it allows me to figure out a flow for the content and how I will build up information. Once the outline was in place I started to flesh out content. Often this required me to research the feature by trying out samples and reading the source code. Writing documentation (and blog posts) is a great way to learn more about a product or feature as you really look more closely than you might normally.

I made an initial pull request to the docs repository so that I could show the team my work and get feedback as I went. Being new to contributing I wanted to make sure I was on the right track. Scott was quickly on the case and offered some valuable feedback.

One of the big differences between writing for my blog and writing for the documentation is the style. In my blog I’m often referring to my personal experience and sharing with readers in a conversational style. For the docs the style is less personal and more concise. When reading documentation, users are often looking to get going quickly so producing tight, clear content is important. At first I found the switch in styles a little difficult, but after a while I was having to correct myself less often.

From there the work continued whenever I could get time to spend on the documentation. I was making contributions in the evenings, weekends and during my lunch breaks at work.

Building a Sample Application

One of the other requirements for good documentation is a sample application. These are often made available in the docs repository and are intended to provide a quick start for developers. Scott asked if it would be possible for me to produce the sample for the feature. The sample would also be used to support code snippets in the documentation. This is a really clever part of the docfx functionality which allows code snippets to be referenced using a special syntax in the markdown file. The code from the sample is then pulled into the documentation by a build process and stays up to date as the sample changes. The syntax even supports highlighting specific lines in the code for clarity.

Building the sample was a little complicated. We were just into the preview 1 of ASP.NET Core 2.1 at this stage, but some of the features of IHttpClientFactory hadn’t made it into that first preview. I was using nightly builds to experiment with the latest available functionality, but getting this working in a sample application proved complicated. I needed to match up the nightly SDK and ASP.NET Core builds to get things building and at times it would simply not build at all!

In the end we agreed that I would wait for the preview 2 release before putting too much time into the sample. Once preview 2 landed I was able to pick it up and build out the code.

Working out how to demonstrate things simply and accurately, but using code that would be suitable if coped and pasted was a careful balance. IHttpClientFactory is made up of a lot of extension method calls to configure the client instances. I found that before long I had a long list for the various options in my Startup class. Breaking these into snippet regions meant I could include the relevant samples in the documentation and break up the method a little.

During my trip to Seattle for my first ever MVP summit I was lucky enough to meeting Ryan Nowak, Glenn Condron and Damian Edwards from the ASP.NET team to chat about the feature and the documentation. During the MVP hack day I spent a bit of time refining the code sample and even got a live code review on one part of it from Glenn and Damian! Thanks guys!

Review and Refinement

Over a period of about 2 months I worked on the documentation and the sample application. It took longer than I expected mostly due to keeping up with the changes and fitting it into my free time. Finally though, this week I was pretty much done and ready for a review by the team.

A few changes were suggested including fixing up some grammar and spelling as well as some feedback on preferred styles and idioms for the sample. It was very valuable feedback and has turned my content into what I hope is some useful documentation.

You can follow the history and comments on the pull request.

Summary

I want to conclude this post with a huge thank you to the team at Microsoft. I was little nervous when I first started out, but was quickly put at ease by everyone I worked with. Scott in particular was very patient and helpful. Luke Latham also offered some great feedback to tidy up the content and language of the documentation.

Glenn and Ryan helped with some questions about the IHttpClientFactory feature as well as offering advice for the sample.

Thanks also goes out to Dylan from the App vNext team who maintain Polly who helped with clarifying some of the Polly functionality and offered some great last minute suggestions to tidy up a few sentences. Having so many people cast an eye over the content really helped tune it and make it clear and concise.

I’ve really enjoyed the collaboration and I have personally learned a lot along the way. It’s a great feeling to have contributed to something which I hope will help many developers start using IHttpClientFactory in their code.

If you’re thinking that this journey sounds fun, I recommend you check out the contributing guide and take a look for an issue you can help with. Even small fixes and corrections are most welcome and the team are a great bunch of people to work with.


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Steve Gordon

Steve Gordon is a Pluralsight author, 6x Microsoft MVP, and a .NET engineer at Elastic where he maintains the .NET APM agent and related libraries. Steve is passionate about community and all things .NET related, having worked with ASP.NET for over 21 years. Steve enjoys sharing his knowledge through his blog, in videos and by presenting talks at user groups and conferences. Steve is excited to participate in the active .NET community and founded .NET South East, a .NET Meetup group based in Brighton. He enjoys contributing to and maintaining OSS projects. You can find Steve on most social media platforms as @stevejgordon

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