NDoc Just Playing Possum; Kevin confirms 2.0 version in the works

Kevin Downs paid my blog a visit yesterday to let everyone know that a new version of NDoc is in the works.  Apparently he has also been receiving help from MS employees who deserve kudos for giving him some much needed information. 

This makes me think that maybe the best thing we could do for non-MSFT tool developer is allow for a bit easier inside access. Maybe a new MVP classification?  Also, congrats on the new baby. 

I've re-posted his comment here for others to see. 

As the main developer of NDoc 1.3 and the titular admin of the project, I thought I'd let you all know that NDoc is not dead. It is, to use an Australian reference, playing possum; alive but keeping very still so as not to attract too much attention!

There is an *alpha* release of a new version of NDoc for the v2.0 framework, although this is not in general circulation.

Originally I had planned to do a simple upgrade of NDoc 1.3, but this proved almost impossible. NDoc2 is, to all intents and purposes, a complete rewrite (a huge undertaking) and has taken far longer than I originally anticipated due to illness. I was forced to 'go dark' on this development because I was getting some fairly offensive emails *demanding* a new release, and I could not give a firm time-line due to the above mentioned illness.

At present I am taking a few weeks off as my wife had a baby a couple of weeks ago :-)

I am planning to resume work soon, but in the meantime anyone interested can contact me at (kevin-at-kdowns-dot-com) add I will add them to my alpha testers mail list and direct them to where they can obtain a copy of the latest build...

To address the main topic, MS has been helping with the new version all be it indirectly. I have exchanged many emails with MS staff who have been very helpful in digging-out the obscure minutiae I needed to get some aspects working. Far more importantly, I received one of the MSDN subscription invites that MS gave the MVPs (my sincere thanks to Oleg Tkachenko) - trying to build software of this scale is hard work using C# Express! :-)

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2006
  You know thats a shame he would recieve hate mail and demands for a new release. Some people. It's not like that paid money for it and not like he earns money for doing it. I just do not understand some people sometimes. I absolutely love NDoc it is a requirement in my tools. However if it just went away I would not be upset at the person that made such a cool tool I would just kind of be bummed.
• Anonymous
  February 23, 2006
  I find the "fairly offensive emails demanding a new release" part pretty scary. Not only are these mail written by "developers" but also by "developers" who did not pay for a code documentation tool. I wonder how they would deal with such demands; I assume I would think some bad words and abandon the project with a public "due to popular demand" notice...
  
  Anyway, glad to hear Kevin did not take this route :)
• Anonymous
  February 24, 2006
  Seems like people are finally founding out just how important NDoc is to them. Now what about the NAnt project? No release in almost a year. Looks like MSBuild crushed it.
• Anonymous
  February 27, 2006
  I found this last night on a romp - and it did a fine job, even if it does have an alpha label
  
  That said, for ASP.NET, there's now no way I can figure to generate the XML documents for the pages, and even for the code in App_Code - what a pita - the old xml doco property is gone, and fiddling around with web.config and the compiler tab yields no joy because of the way the compile happens (file gets overwritten)
• Anonymous
  February 28, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 07, 2006
      The NAnt project, which has been moving slower than an ant, finally released a new...
• Anonymous
  April 03, 2006
  He is working on it again, if you email him, you can get the preview code, what he has know already works well in 2.0 it jsut doesnt support a couple features so far. BUt its jsut as useful and productive as in 1.1 :-) We use it to generate docs on all our new 2.0 code so far.