Its well known that the documentation on directshow was very poor for Windows 2000/XP. I was hoping/expecting that this would improve with the Vista SDK but after dowloading the Vista SDK and reading all the new DirectShow documentation I see that things have not improved.
Example, the new EVR sounds great. But come on, does Microsoft really think that expect that a couple of (minimal) help pages which do not much more then showing the bare interfaces without explanation or examples or giving an overview is enough for us developers to fully understand it
I've been programming DirectShow for 3 years now in various applications but now i've seen the new documentation, it makes me want to cry and work in other area's which are well documented.
Ok, one could argue that this is new stuff and since Vista is not even released, the docs will come in the upcoming months right . Then again how can companies compete with Microsoft in this area if Microsoft does not provide documentation publicly, but has access to all internal sources itself Even if we forget about the new bits and look at the stuff which was already poorly documented in the past then i find it very sad to see that even the old documentation has not been a improved at all !!!
So I thought, well perhaps there are some examples in the sdk which show how to use the new stuff. Well think again. No nice EVR examples available...
I really hope microsoft's directshow developers and managers read this post and do start to improve the documentation. The way it is now will mean a lot of trial-and-error (read time and costs) to find out how the new stuff works....
Erwin Beckers
Vista documentation on DirectShow lacking