Thursday, February 07, 2008
Posted on Thursday, February 07, 2008 10:16:30 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  Comments [1] | 
Categories: .NET | Fundamentals | Utilities

If you are a .NET developer I recommend checking out DocProject. It's an open source front end for the SandCastle documentation engine. Sandcastle picks up where NDoc left off, and is a Microsoft open source project that provides services for creating MSDN style HTML and compiled help. Unfortunately it's a bit of a bear to work with (lots of Xml configuration files, batch files etc).

This is where DocProject comes in. The basic process is to add a "DocProject" or "DocSite" to your solution, and then add references to all the other sites/assemblies in the solution into the DocProject. Then during a build, DocProject actually runs Sandcastle to create the doc.

I've only just played with it a little, and it's pretty easy to get setup and running, but the actual compilation of the help was pretty slow. It was running for >15  minutes on my Core 2 Duo notebook! After digging around a little, it seemed the issue was that I have some ArcGIS Server WebService proxies in one of the assemblies, and it was cranking out all the help doc for that - which is substantially larger than the actual code I was trying to document. Once done, the output is pretty good.

docproject-example

Combine this with GhostDoc, and there is no excuse for not having good developer API documentation for whatever you write.

Check it out at www.codeplex.com/docproject

Friday, January 25, 2008
Posted on Friday, January 25, 2008 6:37:49 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  Comments [0] | 
Categories: Utilities

Today I needed to install SQL 2000 on one of our servers. MSDN subscriptions no longer ship out media for SQL 2000 so I grabbed the ISO image from MSDN. All well and good, but I needed to mount this as a drive on my server which is running Windows Server 2003 x64.

Windows Server cannot mount ISO's on it's own, and although there are lots of commercial products, this is not something I do a lot, so "free" was my price point.What I ended up using is called MagicISO, and it works really nicely.