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Microsoft's Sandcastle emerges as NDoc's creator calls it quits
Last week Microsoft released a Community Technical Preview of Sandcastle, a set of documentation compilers for managed class libraries. Sandcastle, which Microsoft uses internally to build its documentation for the .NET Framework, consists of MrefBuilder and Build Assembler.
Microsoft's announcement came at the same time that Kevin Downs, the project leader for the open-source documentation tool NDoc, said he would no longer be working on the project. Charlie Chen has posted the email that Downs sent to the NDoc mailing list here.
Downs cited the release of Sandcastle as one reason he was calling it quits -- he refers to it as the "inevitable result of MS's 'not-invented-here' mentality." However, Downs also felt shunned and threatened by the open-source community -- shunned when very few NDoc users donated time or money to the product and threatened when users sent a mail-bomb attack because Downs was not working fast enough.
This experience has generated much commentary from the development community, a sampling of which appears below.
"I cannot understand the mentality of someone who demands for developers to hurry up and release a new version of a free software product. If you are in such dire need of the new version, why not hurry up and contribute? Having said that, I feel particularly bad that I never contributed to NDoc, yet enjoyed so much use out of it…. So let’s [band] together and declare today, July 26, 2006, Contribute To Open Source Day. Look at the open source software you use and consider making a tiny contribution to the project if you find it useful." -- Phil Haack
"It's too bad to see what happens to such a useful project. I guess it's common for hobby projects like this one. Having worked for big companies, I can testify that they use open source products extensively, but wouldn't do the slightest thing to contribute to the projects or help them in any way. They just expect the free tools to work perfectly, just like they had paid big money for them!" -- Fabrice Marguerie
"Personally, as an Open Source project co-leader, I'd much rather folks who use DasBlog pick a bug and send me a patch (unified diff format) than give money. I suspect that Kevin would have been happy with a dozen engineers taking on tasks and taking on bugs in their spare time. We are blessed. This Open Source stuff is free. But it's free like a puppy. It takes years of care and feeding. You don't get to criticise a free puppy that you bring in to your home." -- Scott Hanselman
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Message #214569
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Re: Microsoft's Sandcastle emerges as NDoc's creator calls it qu
It's truly a shame how the creator of NDoc has been treated. I liked and used NDoc many times. I'm curious how much Sandcastle will work/look like NDoc.
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Message #214582
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MS culture of do not invent here
One of the reasons for MS Windows to be successful were the plethora of third party tools/Applications. Why does not MSFT do the same thing in the .Net world. While killing every decent and successful Open Source .Net project with their own set of tools, how do they expect their community project sites like gotdotnet and its latest avatar Codeplex to florish? Cant they develop a mechanism for incentivicing "invention" in the community, instead of "re-inventing" the wheel and killing community initiatives.
It is unfortunate that NDoc is officially dead. Shame on those who have perpetrated the vandalism, its time for the individuals to realize, if we cannot grow as community atleast grow up as individuals.
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Message #214596
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Re: Microsoft's Sandcastle emerges as NDoc's creator calls it quits
I think MS is afraid of using Open source tools like NDoc or NUnit because there may be a thinking that people who get familiar with these tools can easily migrate to J2EE world and hence threat to the monopoly world they have built.
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Message #214622
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Re: Microsoft's Sandcastle emerges as NDoc's creator calls it quits
I think MS is afraid of using Open source tools like NDoc or NUnit because there may be a thinking that people who get familiar with these tools can easily migrate to J2EE world and hence threat to the monopoly world they have built.
I suppose this was meant as a joke and you forgot the smiley? Otherwise I find it's quite a stretch to associate NDoc with migration to J2EE. It's not even as close as apples and oranges. But I know it was meant as a joke :)
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Message #214707
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Re: Microsoft's Sandcastle emerges as NDoc's creator calls it quits
You are right I did not put the BIG SMILEY. Atleast somebosy got the joke.
:)
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