Other than a partial class diagram in the overview, the Base class library is undocumented. I realize that some of the classes are used in the tutorial, but I think this shores up my claims about how poor the documentation is across the board. The XPO docs are the worst. They are, at best, a choppy mishmash-mash of features that are lightly glazed over. Maybe XAF will change the "redheaded step child" complex that XPO has suffered. Check out the documentation for other competing ORM products. I wont name them all, but even NHibernate ( a free product) provides a PDF Book.

My suggestion is to use a documentation tool that creates multiple forms of output from one source. PDF book with index, CHM files, Help2, etc... There are plenty of good products out there.

BTW

I placed a suggestion for using "Help & Manual" to support  so they wouldn't have to burn hours generating chm and pdf's that are not delivered with the release.

http://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/p/S92013.aspx

The answer I was given was :

"As for the help authoring software, we aren't planning to switch to another tool. If you can report any specific issues that you experience with the current output, we'll try to fix them. If offline documentation availability delay is the only problem, we can consider delaying our releases so that everything (including offline help files) is in place when installations go out."  

Is that a threat? If you used a decent help product, you wouldn't have to delay releases just to provide additional help formats....... get it!

Producing better documentation is surely at the top of DX list as it would balance the burden on support. So i dont really see the point in pushings things this way.

Evgeniy

 Its actually very simple. To affect change.

Hi all,

First of all thank you for pointing us to this area and sharing your ideas with our community. We appreciate this.
>>
Other than a partial class diagram in the overview, the Base class library is undocumented. I realize that some of the classes are used in the tutorial, but I think this shores up my claims about how poor the documentation is across the board.
<<

We need to know which aspects of the module are still not clear to you after reading the docs and seeing the sources of the DevExpress.Persistent.BaseImpl and DevExpress.Persistent.Base projects.

Please contact us in Support and we will be happy to clarify any aspects of our products. Another good thing to do is to create suggestions where you describe specific areas of the product that you want to learn. We are always happy to get such feedback from you. Usually, such suggestions are immediately considered and planned to be included in the next release

Thank you for registering the S92012 suggestion in Support. I suggest all who read this and are interested in having our docs in PDF format track this suggestion to be informed when the docs in PDF are built.
For future releases we are planning to publish actual help files along with the release to prevent such incidents in the future.

P.S.
As you know, help files can ALWAYS be improved.

From the first beta and up to this release our help writers have done a lot of work and the quality of the documentation has been greatly improved. Almost all aspects of the framework are deeply documented, many videos, how-to’s, KB’s and Code Central examples are available. Note that all our tutorials are linked with the demos, and you can see the results in a demo project if you encounter any difficulty when following a tutorial. You are also free to contact our Support Team and we will be glad to help you.

Just one comment to this.. I am of the type of developer who has limited time to explore all the goodies. Thus, working through "sources" is not of high value. Sometimes a magazine-style summary of what is available and what is useful can do wonders. While we can all read code, sometimes the code is just a bunch of trees and the forest is nowhere to be found!

{too metaphoric? ☺}

Drew, I agree with you that investigating the source code written by other people is not easy task, especially if this is the sources of the whole business framework like XAF, but nevertheless, returning to initial theme of this post, we consider that information provided, for instance within these topics:

Business Class Library
Add a Class From the Business Class Library

Business Class Library Customization Module

and elsewhere in our help is enough to get the purpose of this module. Also, we always happy to answer any questions, in case of any difficulty.
 
I simply underlined the search within sources (DevExpress.Persistent.BaseImpl) to hint at the place where built-in business classes “live”, and to allow you to make sure that they are regular persistent classes that are ready to use in many business scenarios.

On another matter, if you want to learn XAF in more detail, and want to know everything about each class and method used in XAF, for instance what’s the purpose of the XpoDescriptorFactory class or what does the FieldInfoWrapper (BTW they live in DevExpress.Persistent.Base). This task is impossible without serious challenging of the sources.

If so, please add the corresponding suggestions and we will consider adding the required information about these entities in the future version of the XAF’s help.

In any case, we are happy that you are interested in our products and want to learn them better. Moreover, I am sure this will help many other users.