When you take a step back from a community for spell after being in the thick of it for some time, it’s interesting to see what you find upon return.
In this case, I’m referring to the .NET community and there are two stories that I want to highlight:
- Documentation automation
- Decompilation
Town of NDoc
Once upon a time, there was NDoc, a convenient tool to help developers produce reference-level documentation for their .NET assemblies and solutions.
A force from the Pacific Northwest determined that there was much value in NDoc, and Sandcastle was born. (Note: The chapter on NIH isn’t covered here, nor are the alleged actions of an individual in the NDoc “community.”)
Sandcastle was more about the command line than NDoc, and eventually Sandcastle Help File Builder arose:
Sandcastle was originally created by Microsoft back in 2006. The last official release from Microsoft occurred in June 2010. Until October 2012, it was hosted at the Sandcastle project site on CodePlex. In October 2012, Microsoft officially declared that they were ceasing support and development of Sandcastle. The Sandcastle tools have been merged into the Sandcastle Help File Builder project and all future development and support for them will be handled at this project site. The Sandcastle tools themselves remain separate from and have no dependency on the help file builder. As such, they can be used in a standalone fashion with your own scripts and build tools if that is your preference.
Assuming that Kevin Downs and others who originally contributed to NDoc are happily pursuing new ventures (and satisfied to see their initial efforts validated by SHFB et al), it seems like documentation automation is alive and well in the .NET community.
City of .NET Reflector
Once upon a time, Lutz Roeder authored and maintained the most excellent .NET Reflector decompilation tool for the .NET developer community. At its prime, I didn’t know a .NET developer who wasn’t actively using the tool and who wouldn’t readily nominate Lutz for knighthood.
But then .NET Reflector’s future changed…
Red Gate will continue to provide the free community version…
Well, until they didn’t!
Other than referencing ZDnet’s coverage at the time, I’ll leave you to Google the rest of the flames that resulted from this decision. Suffice it to say that it got ugly, and the $35 price is now no less than $95 and as high as $195.
The severe curve in price hikes tends to indicate a sharp drop in demand. Furthermore, the original Reflector add-ins portal seems to have been abandoned, which is a shame–lots of solid contributions were made therein that I use to leverage frequently (er, once upon a time)…
So, in the face of a tool that was free but now costs almost a benjamin for the basic version, what to do?
Two potential alternatives quickly present themselves: Telerik JustDecompile and JetBrains dotPeek. Let’s start with dotPeek…
I’ve had some experience working with JetBrains in the past to establish a more open stance. Unfortunately, that didn’t result in any great or lasting success:
It’s interesting to see other potential similarities, too, between the Omea progression and the dotPeek progression. For example, JetBrains originally realized Omea by hiring Dmitry Jemerov who authored Syndirella–ironically an open source project. More recently, the first dotPeek plug-in author, Matt Ellis joined JetBrains as a .NET development tools evangelist. Assembly list support is already baked into dotPeek 1.0 directly.
As I remarked on Twitter, I sincerely hope that JetBrains has embraced open development for dotPeek; otherwise, I fear reactions to dotPeek such as this one for Omea.
Switching to JustDecompile, one of my first (positive community-oriented) impressions came from reading the (timely) comments on this blog post.
Even the blog’s first criticism–needs registration for download–has been addressed. I agree that this was a bit heavy-handed, but now you can download JustDecompile straightaway and only provide/create account information if you want support for the free tool (during JustDecompile installation).
Telerik has posted two, free plugins, which installed easily (after I realized that you have to expand the .sflb files for JustDecompile to find the entry points as otherwise instructed). (Telerik, please update your instructions to make this clear.)
Time will tell if the .NET community will rally around this tool by submitting new plugins. It’s clear that Telerik is listening to the community it has (e.g. this feature came directly from the UserVoice site for JustDecompile), and that is a good start.
I wonder if things would have worked out differently if GitHub had been around at the time the original transitions for .NET Reflector and NDoc had occurred. (Lutz is on GitHub, just not including .NET Reflector due to its aforementioned transfer.)
Is it too late for .NET decompilation to become truly open, supported by a vibrant community?
In the tale of two tools, the formative city of decompilation could take some cues from the happy town of documentation.
