Ages ago, NDoc- a jDoc clone- was the best free .NET documentation-generating application in town.  For various reasons, that project shut down, and Microsoft released it's internal documenting system, Sandcastle, to the public.  However Sandcastle by itself is non-trivial to understand and implement.  It's designed to gen up the entire MSDN documentation site, so it can be overwhelming for creating docs for your small line-of-business app.

Enter Sandcastle Help File Builder.  This gem brings back the simplicity and open source spirit of NDoc, and adds some functionality from Sandcastle to provide a great documenting solution for small or large projects. I'd checked it out in earlier versions, but it's come a long way. It even has a console app, which can easily be integrated into your continuous integration process.   In addition, you can add documents other than the typical xml-doc and build a true compiled help that a developer may actually use.

Here's how we set ours up:

• A solution has a _FileReferences project for file-based dll references and other non-compiled code.  (Build is false for all Build configurations).  This project contains:
  • a Help folder that  contains .htm files and the compiled .chm file
  • a .shfbproj file that manages the documentation project.
• In the .shfbproj:
  • A site map has been added to build the table of contents.  It has nodes pointing to each .htm file.
  • The solutions' projects have been added as Documentation Sources.
• An automated process downloads the solution from source control, checks out the .shfbproj and .chm, runs the console app to generate a new .chm, and checks everything back in.

This way, the documentation is constantly updated and available in source control alongside the project!

I came across this run-time error message while trying to run a web app project from Visual Studio 2008:

"Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to a failure in starting the process for the user instance. The connection will be closed."

The app has a connectionString pointing to a SQL Server 2005 Express instance, so I checked to make sure the instance service was running and it was.  As any good computer shade tree mechanic would do, I restarted the service hoping for the best, but nothing changed.

So as always, Google to the rescue.  Joe Stagner in this blog entry describes what he did to fix the problem when he experienced it.  I deleted the corresponding folder under username and it worked!  If I had more time I'd try to dig some more for an explanation on why this happens and why the fix works, but we'll leave that exercise for another day.  For now I'm just glad it works.

Standard disclaimer: make sure you have data backed up before you go deleting things willy-nilly.  This fix worked for Joe Stagner and it worked for me, but there's no guarantee it won't fubar your SQL Server Express instance.

Update: Depending on your version of Windows, this folder may not be under 'Documents and Settings', but rather: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server Data\SQLEXPRESS  Again, Your Mileage May Vary.

Mix09 is happening this week.  This is one of Microsoft's larger developers conferences and sure to drop a few new tools, features, and plans.  Below are some cool new technologies I'm watching.  This post will be updated as I hear about interesting news, so check back from time to time.

• Of course, as already mentioned, MVC v1 is now live!
• Expression Web SuperPreview - effortlessly test browser compatibility in Expression Web.  I hope we get this for Visual Studio soon!
• Silverlight 3 Beta 1 - Hardware GPU acceleration. New codecs, including AAC. Write your own codecs. IIS Media Services - static and LIVE streaming video support easily installed from Web Platform Installer (see below).  3D perspective support for any control.  Improved fonts.  Multitouch support. Support for running outside-of-browser on Windows and Mac in secure sandbox, with offline-awareness and automatic updates.  New Eclipse IDE tools for developing on Mac.  The download size - including all these new features - is actually smaller than Silverlight 2 (4.4M)!  Beta today, shipping RTM later this year.
• Expression Blend 3 - design Silverlight 3 UIs.  Supports the new features, and has "SketchFlow" for sketching prototype page flows, transitions, and layouts, then generating documentation and actual Silverlight code.  Very cool, and also something VS needs!
• Web Platform Installer and Web App Gallery - Make it easier to install framework and related MS features, plus popular applications that run in IIS.  They just called it "an App Store for the Web Server". Some apps included: DotNetNuke, Umbraco.
• Azure commercial release this year.  Update this week supports PHP & CGI, has ADO.NET support that works with ADO EF, NHibernate, etc. similar to your traditional MS SQL apps.   It also supports geo-locating your applications and storage to enable edge content delivery, geo-load balancing, and other scenarios.  No pricing released yet. New SDK and Visual Studio Tools CTP available.
• New Virtual Earth Silverlight SDK.

I'm sure this will be old news in about an hour, but MVC is now live! Download here.  LifeCycle was an early adopter on this - our first production MVC app was deployed for testing at the client last week. The result was a clean separation of concerns and a light, clean standards-compliant web UI, with just enough jQuery goodness. 

Need to generate create scripts for your SQL Express database?  Here's a little batch I've used several times recently to do just that:

@echo off

SET DatabaseFileName=DbName

ECHO Generating code for %DatabaseFileName%

ECHO Generating create script 'CreateDatabaseSchema.sql'

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Publishing\SqlPubWiz.exe" script -C "Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;AttachDbFilename=%CD%\%DatabaseFileName%.mdf;Integrated Security=True;User Instance=True"  -noschemaqualify -schemaonly -nodropexisting -f CreateDatabaseSchema.sql

To use, just drop in a .bat next to the .mdf, change DbName and run.  It will output 'CreateDatabaseSchema.sql containing create script for all of the tables and stored procs in the database.