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Subject:RE: Documenting an API From:"Lydia Wong" <lydiaw -at- fpoint -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 27 Dec 2000 11:36:52 -0500
Hi Yanick,
You asked for more information about documenting APIs. This subject has been
discussed several times over the past few years. It might be worth your time
to search the archives for "API" and find the related posts. There has been
some excellent advice in many posts.
As for examples of API documents, you're welcome to look at some of the
online help files produced by our company. Not to be immodest, but our
documentation has won awards in local STC competitions, and we have had very
good reviews both in professional publications and from our users. We are
always striving to make our documentation better, but we are pleased with
what we have accomplished so far. Just to give you an idea of what we do,
our company makes components for Windows programmers (ActiveX and DLL
controls).
You can get copies of any of our online help files by going to our web site
(www.fpoint.com) and downloading trial versions of our products. Once you
have downloaded a trial version, run the installation program. You can then
access the online help by choosing the Start menu, then the product name
menu for the product you installed (if you installed our Tab Pro product,
choose Tab Pro 3, in other words), and then choose the Help item. That will
launch our online help.
As you will see, our documentation consists of a user's guide section, which
provides conceptual information and procedures for accomplishing common
tasks, and a reference guide, which is the detailed reference information
for every property, method, and event for the control. This is fairly common
practice when documenting APIs. We also strive to provide a small code
example for each property, method, and event, and I would encourage you to
do the same. Customers LOVE examples! Our products also ship with larger
sample projects (in Visual Basic or C++), which are usually produced by our
support department, but we writers occasionally produce them as well. The
more sample code, the better!
HTH!
Lydia
__________________
Lydia Wong
Technical Writer
FarPoint Technologies, Inc.
www.fpoint.com
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