Just got wind that Kevin Downs of the NDoc project is removing himself from the development of NDoc, leaving no one actively developing NDoc. Further, that means there’s no NDoc 2.0 on the way.

That’s bad news in a lot of ways. First, I feel bad for Kevin since it sounds like he’s done a lot of widely used but not-directly-appreciated work and got a lot of abuse for not moving faster on NDoc 2.0. Second, that means folks who currently use NDoc in a lot of extended ways - via NAnt build scripts, in other automated utilities, etc. - are screwed for .NET 2.0 functionality. In a particularly personal bit of bad news, that means I’ve got to figure out what will happen with CR_Documentor

• if .NET 2.0 isn’t supported in NDoc, what do I render? (Input on that topic is welcome…)

I guess Microsoft has some sort of less-feature-complete documentation rendering engine codenamed “Sandcastle” they’re coming out with that will generate MSDN style documentation similar to NDoc but in a more cumbersome-sounding process. It obviously won’t have instant NAnt support, meaning there’s going to be some hacking around to get that to work.

I feel like MS is showing up late to the party on this one. If you’re going to release a product, at least make it full-featured enough to be competitive with similar products. I’ve thought about writing my own blog engine for a while now and I wouldn’t release it until it did all the stuff standard blog packages do today; if you couldn’t leave comments, for example, it’s not a full blog package.

Of course, it will most likely become the de-facto standard with the vacuum that NDoc will be leaving. Which is unfortunate, but c’est la vie.