[khazhoux]

It resonated for me because 10 years ago I worked on a COM project (browser extension that had to support IE) and the total lack of information for that "pre-internet" technology meant I had to rely on very hard to find books. There was one book in particular that without it, the project would have failed. And that's what everything used to be like (well, more like before Internet, not necessarily before Stack Overflow).

[BeefWellington]

Having stopped writing COM components in the early 2000s, back then there were very good resources at Microsoft's site (MSDN) as well as within the Visual Studio help. It's interesting to hear it got worse just ten years later but kind of doesn't surprise me that they wouldn't upkeep that kind of documentation.

[HWR_14]

I did a COM project around the same time. It took a little bit of searching, but I found an excellent tutorial on a random site. Something that could not have existed at StackOverflow because it didn't answer a specific question, any question it answered would have been downvoted, and it would have been difficult to find there.