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Archives / 2009 / June

  • The Future of GhostDoc

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    Today is the day that I'm finally able to speak about why things have been pretty quiet lately regarding the future of GhostDoc.

    I'm happy to announce GhostDoc has been acquired by SubMain, developer of tools like CodeIt.Right. The agreement covers the usage of GhostDoc's documentation generation technology in their products, as well as the availability of GhostDoc as a standalone product. SubMain will continue to maintain and distribute a non-crippled version of GhostDoc free of charge, and will make sure that it will work with future versions of Visual Studio like the upcoming VS2010. The first step is a new version 2.5 of GhostDoc that has been released just moments ago.

    For more information please take a look at a Q&A with Serge Baranovsky from SubMain and me that covers past, present and future of GhostDoc.

    As I already mentioned in the Q&A, from my experiences of working with the guys at SubMain (both on the legal and the technical stuff), I can say that GhostDoc is in good hands. The developers now have my issue tracking database where I collected and annotated all the feature requests of the recent years, but I also would like to ask every GhostDoc user to please let them know if you have ideas how to improve this tool.

    I'd like to use this opportunity to say a big Thank You to all GhostDoc users out their for their (overwhelmingly positive) feedback over the recent years. Thank You!
     

    Update: Important note for existing GhostDoc users
    There are uninstall issues with the old GhostDoc version 2.1.3 (and versions before) that under specific circumstances may lead to losing your Visual Studio settings on Vista machines. I'm already working on a solution to the problem (with help from one of the SubMain developers), in the meantime please back up your settings as described in this step-by-step guide before uninstalling the old GhostDoc version. During uninstallation, if a Visual Studio instance pops up and asks you to choose a developer profile, choose one and continue. This will lead to the loss of the settings, which then can be restored by importing the backup you just made before. Note that you have to choose a profile; cancelling the dialog will lead to a corrupted state of the uninstallation.

    The new GhostDoc from SubMain is using different install/uninstall/VS integration technology that has been proven in their other products and does not have such problems.

    Update 2: Please read this blog post on upgrading to GhostDoc 2.5 and later.