Dave Sexton's Blog

Are you part of that herd of developers that is used to documenting applications by writing help topics in raw HTML?  The power of it is nice, being able to add a pinch of bold here, a splash of italics there, some CSS for different layouts, a floating image, several nested tables, an abundance of hyperlinks, embedded Flash and media players, ...

I've just released the first beta version of ContractN, which is a fully managed programming-by-contract framework that uses the CLR's built-in support for aspect-oriented programming (AOP), which provides a way to seamlessly and intuitively describe the required pre- and post-conditions of a type's contract. I got the idea based on this blog ...

I've just published the Help! project on CodePlex, which is intended to provide a fully managed compiled help system to replace Help 1.x (.chm).  Please contribute to this project by using the discussions area to post comments and ideas or join the development team.  If you want to join the team then please see the Welcome! thread for ...

In case anyone's interested, this post contains my notes for converting the code base of DocProject 1.7.0 to support Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. After that I've included DocProject's backlog of tasks, which may contain some ideas that you'd be interested in seeing me implement in a subsequent release. Notes on the Conversion from 1.7.0 to 2008 ...

It's about that time again… Just FYI, DocProject 1.6.2 RC had more downloads in the last month than any other version to date. Thanks to everyone who tried it and provided valuable feedback! And BTW, I wrote a new article called How to Diagnose and Resolve Issues that provides guidance for gathering diagnostic information if you're having ...

I was browsing the web the other day looking for community feedback on DocProject and I was pleased to come across two public websites that use DocSite templates to provide public API documentation over the web. XML Library API The first DocSite that I found is at http://www.xmllab.net/mvpxml. It was created by Microsoft MVPs in XML ...

DocProject 1.6.2 was released and is now available for download on CodePlex. I want to thank all of DocProject's users that took the time to report bugs and provide diagnostic information to me. You've been helpful. Recently, Anand blogged about DocProject and some of the other community projects that can automate Sandcastle to generate help ...

In this blog post I'm going to describe how you can use a Setup and Deployment project in Visual Studio 2005, along with a few other tools, to create a single, self-extracting executable to install your managed software and prerequisites. I'm also going to provide a solution to one of the problems that I encountered when I recently attempted ...

In this blog post you'll see and read about some of the new features of DocProject that will be released with the 1.6.0 Release Candidate. But first, I'd just like to say thanks to everyone who downloaded DocProject and provided feedback. I appreciate it. Please keep the comments and feedback coming! If you're only interested in screen ...

Update 2/10/08: DocProject 1.10.0 RC provides first-class support for Sandcastle's conceptual build process, which compiles additional content written in the XML-based Microsoft Assistance Markup Language (MAML) to produce MSDN-like help topics, optionally in combination with auto-generated reference topics.  19 conceptual templates are ...