Who is this tutorial for?

I’m currently doing some Windows Workflow Foundation related work. Like every developer I searched the Net for a couple of tutorials and downloaded Hands-on Labs for Windows Workflow Foundation. Quoting straight from the overview found on the website:

These labs are suitable for a .NET developer with 6 months experience who wants to learn about Windows Workflow Foundation.

And now, straight from a document found in downloaded files:

1. Open Visual Studio 2008 by going to: Start Menu | Programs | Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 | Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
2. In Visual Studio 2008, select the menu command: File | New | Project
…

And this goes on for good 3 pages, with screenshots, just to tell me: “Create a new Sequential Workflow Console Application and rename the default Workflow1 to HelloWorldWorkflow”.

And such gems for developers with 6 months of experience can be seen in most of the dozen of documents included in the labs.

Seriously… WTF? I thought someone with six months of experience (that’s just a bit over one thousand hours of full-time work, assuming a standard 168-hour working month) should have an idea how to create a project. Obviously the person who created this doc has been told to write a certain number of pages and ran out of content. Don’t get me wrong – these labs are quite good to learn the basics, but there’s way too much (20%-30%) padding.

Why don’t just cut down on the padding and make everyone happy? After all, good developers != monkeys.