Re: [ndoc-devel] NDoc 2.0 - R.I.P.

[Mark I. <mi...@so...>]

Sandcastle is Microsoft's in-house documentation compiler that they have
been using for the .NET Framework help.

http://blogs.microsoft.com/sandcastle - that blog site got setup
yesterday after an influx of people starting requesting information via
the forums.

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I'm sure the increased user base in the last 24 hours is partly due to
the email we received yesterday. I personally had never heard of
Sandcastle till then.

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From: ndo...@li...
[mailto:ndo...@li...] On Behalf Of Tim
Mulholland
Sent: 28 July 2006 12:46
To: ndo...@li...
Subject: Re: [ndoc-devel] FW: NDoc 2.0 - R.I.P.

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Well, I think I can state for all of us who were patiently awaiting 2.0
that this stinks... But whatchagonnado?

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Anyone want to clue me in to what Sandcastle is?

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From: ndo...@li...
[mailto:ndo...@li...] On Behalf Of Mark
Ingram
Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 4:31 AM
To: ndo...@li...
Subject: [ndoc-devel] FW: NDoc 2.0 - R.I.P.

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I presume many of you have seen this...

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From: Kevin Downs [mailto:nd...@kd...]=20
Sent: 26 July 2006 18:32
To: nd...@kd...
Subject: NDoc 2.0 - R.I.P.

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

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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!=20

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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.

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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'. =20

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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 :-)

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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...

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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.

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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!

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Kevin

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P.S. If anyone wants to take over as admin on the SourceForge NDoc
project - contact me. If not, I'll be removing myself in 14 days.