Too difficult: Providing examples/documentation for your vast and complex API/framework

I am sure Paul Webster of Eclipse fame is a good lad, but I doubt that he realizes that his tireless help for all questions surrounding Eclipse falls shorter than he would believe or prefer:

Pointing someone asking for how to rename a project programmatically to MoveResourcesOperation would be useful, if…

1) …the API documentation for the Eclipse RCP framework would pick the original poster up at that point (documented uses of the class inside the Eclipse RCP: 0; and it throws things like “IPath” at the humble reader)

2) … or if the internet would spill over with examples for using MoveResourcesOperation (10 hits for “new MoveResourcesOperation”).

What can be done to improve the current situation? Maybe every new API, method, class, extension point, etc. in the Eclipse RCP framework must be accompanied by a tiny and self-contained example before a release build of Eclipse is allowed to be shipped as “stable” or “final”.

As it is now, the Eclipse RCP is horribly frustrating to develop for, not because it is a vast and over-engineered framework (which it is in my opinion), but because of lack of examples and documentation for a vast number of very common use cases.

Windows Vista: Abysmal moving folders performance

In Windows Vista’s Windows Explorer moving the folder MyFolder (containing 40,000 files, and roughly 3.5 GB) at C:\Users\MyUser to C:\Users\MyUser\Desktop takes roughly 2 to 4 seconds.

Moving the folder back via Windows Explorer takes about 23 to 25 seconds (!).

Moving the folder back and forth via “move” command in cmd.exe takes roughly 1 second.

Given that moving a directory on the same partition is a very cheap operation on NTFS, the last figure seems acceptable, the second one leaves me unsatisfied and the first figure – plus the fact that it is 4+ times as slow to move in the other direction – leaves me with the feeling that some Microsoft developers suck just as much as everybody else at programming.

Throw in the complaints about perceived performance issues in Windows Vista and I am at wits end as to what the heck the product managers and developers at Microsoft are thinking when they decide not to fix these issues.

The system specs:

Windows Vista Ultimate, SP1
AMD Dual Core 4450e
4 GB RAM