James Simmonds

Finally! Sandcastle is go! CTP just released here . This is MSFT's NDoc style source code documentation tool finally unleashed and with the recent announcement of Kevin Downs , the main NDoc developer pulling out of further NDoc development (which Sandcastle influenced to some degree) this is a very eagerly awaited event! Other links Sandcastle blog "The Hansel-factor" - Scotts review here Mikael Söderström has a "Sandcastle Helper" here Ashley van Gerven has a batch script available here Have fun!

I've been using IE 7 for a little while now and I am quite impressed with it. The bit I am disappointed with is offline support, a feature that has been dropped or rather superseded by its Rss support. Now I wouldn't be upset with this if it wasn't for my new TabletPC...with IE 6 installed on it I can quite happily save pages offline for reading on the train home and this is great. I'd love to do this with IE 7 and use the cool tabs feature but you can't do it and it's a real shame as I do like what they have done with it - I just wish they hadn't dropped this feature as it's the main one I use! I've just got a Fujitsu Lifebook P1510 and I'm really impressed with it. I particularly like the handwriting recognition. It's very accurate without any training but on my bumpy train ride home it takes twice as long to actually write anything but it looks pretty damn cool! Already though I'm worried that as a niche (ultra portable) laptop I am g...

(via ISerializable ) Database Answers is a (thorough) collection of "patterns" for database schemas to common (and not so common) applications. Just like application blocks provide a nice a tried and tested core to your application then so do these schemas for your data model - why reinvent the wheel? Even if you use this validate your schema "after" the fact it's still a great resource to be aware of and certainly speeds things up if you do take the plunge and use one. Kudos to the author for putting this together and making it available - thanks, if only he had a globalised digital media content model I'd be over the moon!!

This cracked me up when I read it and I had to double check that the date wasn't April 1st! "The first production release may take you twelve months to deliver, the second release nine months, and then other releases are delivered every six months. An early focus on deployment issues not only enables you to avoid problems it also allows you to take advantage of your experiences during development" Priceless! Just about sums it up really. This is an almost unbelievable attempt to 'make trendy' RUP. Like traditional Project Management, people have made entire careers and businesses based around RUP and this looks like a desperate attempt to bring this type of process back into the limelight with a poor attempt at integrating "agile" into it. Just how far do you go taking ideas and techniques from another framework, try to overlay and fit them into something like RUP before you should just quit and join the other side? Ok I agree that cross pollination of ...

We're in the process of moving to Visual Studio Team System and porting our various unit testing, automated builds etc and one of the tools I'm surprised is missing from VSTS is an NDoc replacement. I'm all for open source/third party tools and MSFT has done such a thorough job on the unit testing side I thought they might have done something in the code documentation area too (in all probability they spent too much time on the testing stuff and didn't have any left). Anyway, I started to research NDoc and VSTS and found that the project seems to have stalled and there wasn't an official version with 2005 support (Generics) - a private beta is floating about though apparently. After catching a thread on a discussion forum I picked up on this post about "Sandcastle" - the code name for the MSFT internal documentation tool. Expect a release sometime this year then ;-) In the meantime there is a interim version of NDoc that does support 2005 and you can find...