grack.com

Looks like NDoc is one of many .NET open-source projects to “bite the big one”, but certainly not the last. I stopped development on NProf a while back because I couldn’t build up any momentum around it. I suppose that it was slightly annoying that I found some of my GPL’d code in Jetbrains’ new profiler. Perhaps they could have contributed something back to NProf at least.

NAnt releases are getting further apart and the mailing list traffic is dwindling. Log4Net seems to be moving so slow I don’t know how they manage to get releases out!

Is there such a fundamental difference between .NET and Java developers that one community can sustain such a great set of open-source projects and one can’t?

The sad thing about the death of open-source projects on the .NET platform is that they end up being replaced by closed-source (or worse – shared-source) projects that you can’t fix bugs in or redistribute without a team of lawyers.

I’m not sure why, but they don’t seem to learn anything from the open-source equivalents that they clone either. Compare NAnt to MSBuild, for instance. MSBuild ends up being a horribly complicated system that doesn’t let you do half the stuff as clean or as elegantly as the equivalent NAnt script.

As the original author of the solution task in NAnt, I can now say that I’m glad that they have to deal with the numerous ideosyncracies in their bizarre world of .NET project building, like reading source files to figure out what the names of embedded resources are.

All I can really say to them is good luck re-implementing all this stuff.