How should I (not) ask requests for documentation?

Question

I asked Where do I find conceptual documentation for Windows Runtime? which was fairly quickly closed a "not constructive". Despite my pleas in comments as soon as the first close votes appeared, nobody explained to me what was nonconstructive about it. Now I'm confused.

I suppose those who voted to close did so because they thought my question was just a badly disguised rant. (If anybody can see a different motivation for closing, please do inform me). But since I do want an answer -- an actual answer going you should RTFM [here](http://bla.bla/bla), not just validation of my frustrations -- can someone help me with how to ask the question in a way that won't get it closed.

The rant-sounding parts of the question was an honest attempt to avoid misunderstandings. There was an earlier question by someone else which got an easy to answer that is not actually helpful to me, and so I explained why it is not helpful, in the hope of preventing that misunderstanding and cluing the reader in to what it is I need.

I also put in a long series of deperrately-phrased example questions that I would like the documentation I'm trying to find to answer. That's because, since I'm looking for resources to help fill my ignorance, I need to describe how I'm ignorance to the reader so he can know what I want -- and simply providing a comprehensive example of my ignorance seemed like a good way to describe it.

It's true enough that what I ultimately want to know is something one could "write an entire book about" -- but I was closed as "unconstructive", not NARQ. And it's clear to me that somebody at Microsoft must have written that book already, somewhere, because there are actual people out there writing WinRT apps, and the documentation I've found so far would not in itself have enabled them to do so. Perhaps (even hopefully) it's a set of web pages rather than a book, but I need to know where it is. Something like this comprehensive introduction to COM, just with "WinRT" instead of "COM".

Or is everybody out there simply fumbling in the dark without documentation, doing what seems to work in practice, despite not having any way to know whether its working is part of the contract or just an incidental feature of the implementation they're testing with? Raymond Chen will have their heads.

What do I do now?

Answer 1

The first paragraph of your question was clear:

I'm trying to learn enough about Windows Runtime to make a recommendation about what it would entail for my employer to port our existing applications to it. I'm having trouble finding documentation that provides a technical overview of how the API works.

Things went downhill from there. This is how it reads, in order:

1. A somewhat protracted soliloquy that vents more than telling us where you looked or why you looked there.
2. A threat to down vote any answer you receive on certain conditions:

   These are examples only. Attempts to provide answers to these specific questions without telling me what I should have read to learn them myself WILL be downvoted

3. The most bizarre multiple choice question I have ever seen

You are asking a single question in hopes of receiving an answer that points you to some piece of documentation detailing what's involved in porting any program to Windows? Beyond the tl;dr factor, I can't find anything in the question that described what your program actually is or does.

It looks like you're interested in asynchronous I/O (I can't be sure). You could try asking a more specific question?

Something like:

I have a program written for (os) which we want to port to Windows. My main concern in porting is (async I/O?) because I can't find concrete documentation that explains (doubt). Here is a generic sample of code, what steps would I need to take to port it?

That should be constructive enough for SO if you word it carefully. Keep in mind, we exist to help you with specific problems that you can illustrate with code. We don't have the capacity to maintain a pure list of links to other sites.

It looks like you're interested in specific areas of the documentation you want, but it's really hard to tell from your question.

Answer 2

If there was a specific place with all this documentation, you and Google would surely already know that. If there is not, how can we answer your question with a correct answer?

Everyone would have to list their favorite sites, and there's where it turns non-constructive.

The only authoritative answer would be if a person with inside information were to tell you that there is nothing to read, ever.