Brenton House

Brenton,

We are looking at Innovasys Help Studio Lite as an option for GUI. I will provide more information as it's available.

How do you wnvision building MSBuild tasks? Please feel free to email me directly and my address is aramATmicrosoftDOTcom. Cheers.

Anand..

Jan Schreuder blogged about it earlier, and the buzz around Sandcastle is growing...Brenton House posted...

I've been using alpha builds of NDoc2 and I've found it to work well enough for me. The big issue with this Innovasys Help Studio Lite (which I had to install to install to get NDoc2 to work) is that it keeps trying to install crap on my machine when I start up certain applications (i.e. CD Burner XP Pro freeware)...it's mind boggling and annoying as hell.

"I have used the NDoc2 alphas for quite a while, but I never had to install Help Studio Lite in order to use them.  What message did you get when you tried to use NDoc2 without Help Studio Lite?"

Actually, it was installed along with VS2005 SDK April CTP, which had a component that I needed to run NDoc2 (and for the life of me I can't recall what it was...).

But that's kind of been settled: http://www.charliedigital.com/PermaLink,guid,95b2ab68-ba92-413a-b758-2783cde5df9c.aspx

Unfortunately, Kevin Downs has just emailed his beta testing community that he has decided to discontinue work on NDoc 2.0.

His email:

"I have decided to discontinue work on NDoc 2.0 and no longer participate in any open-source development work.

The development and release of NDoc 1.3 was a huge amount of work, and by all accounts widely appreciated. Unfortunately, despite the almost ubiquitous use of NDoc, there has been no support for the project from the .Net developer community either financially or by development contributions. Since 1.3 was released, there have been the grand total of eleven donations to the project. In fact, were it not for Oleg Tkachenko’s kind donation of a MS MVP MSDN subscription, I would not even have a copy of VS2005 to work with!

To put this into perspective, if only roughly 1-in-10 of the those who downloaded NDoc had donated the minimum allowable amount of $5 then I could have worked on NDoc 2.0 full-time and it could have been released months ago! Now, I am not suggesting that this should have occurred, or that anyone owes me anything for the work I have done, rather I am trying to demonstrate that if the community values open-source projects then it should do *something* to support them. MS has for years acknowledged community contributions via the MVP program but there is absolutely no support for community projects.

Once ‘Sandcastle’ is released, it is my belief that it will become the de-facto standard and that NDoc will slowly become a stagnant side-water. This will happen regardless of technical considerations, even if Sandcastle were to be less feature-complete. It's just an inevitable result of MS's 'not-invented-here' mentality, one only has to look at Nant and NUnit to see the effects of MS 'competition'.

This is not, however, my only reason for stopping development work - I have a big enough ego to think I could still produce a better product than them :-)

As some of you are aware, there are some in the community who believe that a .Net 2.0 compatible release was theirs by-right and that I should be moving faster – despite the fact that I am but one man working in his spare time...

This came to head in the last week; I have been subjected to an automated mail-bomb attack on both my public mail addresses and the ndoc2 mailing list address. These mails have been extremely offensive and resulted in my ISP temporarily suspending my account because of the traffic volume. This incident has been reported to the local authorities, although I am highly doubtful they will be able to do anything about it.

This has was the ‘last-straw’ and has convinced me that I should withdraw from the community; I’m not prepared to have myself and my family threatened by some lunatic!

"