Infrastructure and Documentation

With my new job at Google, I’ve found it harder and harder to spend as much time as I would like on Gallio and MbUnit.  It’s hard to find a good solid block of time to work on stuff without too many other distractions so I’ve been spending my time on little infrastructure projects.

The theory is that if I can build a big enough lever… then I can pretend there really are 32 hours in a day.  :-)

New Stuff

1. Auto-Publish to Web

Most of the Gallio and MbUnit web site content including documentation resources are now published to the web automatically by our Continuous Integration build server.

In other words, any committer can change the website just by checking in some code, and waiting 3-5 minutes for the web site to be built and the changes to propagate.

This kind of setup is really cool.  Seriously seriously cool.  So cool I know Oren has blogged about it.

Given my time resources are dwindling (and will even more once I start working on Android stuff), automating the whole pipeline is golden.  I can practically pretend that it’s real-time.  Hit commit and move on to another task.

2. New Wiki!

Let me be blunt.  The Gallio documentation is woefully incomplete.

The main problem is that I expected that the Gallio Book writing to progress more rapidly than it has so I didn’t spend much time developing alternative documentation resources.

Of course, there have been many offers to help write content for the book but little has materialized so far.  That’s just how Open Source is sometimes.  Lots of people want to help but there is always a barrier to contribution.  In this case I’ve lowered the barrier a bit by automating the book pipeline from commit through to publication on the web but writing high quality documentation still takes time and preparation (especially in book form).

So…

Say hello to quick & dirty documentation by the masses for the masses.

The new Gallio Wiki is here!

It’s a little empty...  Please help fill it up.  :-)

Also, if you are interested, the old MbUnit v2 Wiki is still available on the Internet Archive on the Gallio website.  We should probably try to port some of this content over, or something.

3. Old MbUnit v2 Documentation Is Back

A couple of years ago, Ben Hall invested quite a lot of time getting Sandcastle and DocProject to play nicely together and assembling the documentation.

Unfortunately when we moved the MbUnit.com website a couple of years ago, we lost some content.  Specifically, we lost the documentation site.

Oh… we still had the code to generate the documentation site, of course, but the specific versions of Sandcastle and DocProject that we used were no longer available and the new versions were not compatible with the old code.

Great.  Bit rot.  For two years, I was sitting on a pile of documentation that I couldn’t compile.

Last night I decided to bite the bullet and try again.  It was a total nightmare!  The whole ordeal took me maybe 12 hours.   I spent a good 8 hours trying to upgrade to a newer version of DocProject and getting nowhere fast.

Edit: I should point out that I don't blame my problems on DocProject or Sandcastle themselves. The real problem is that I didn't really understand how it all worked so I wasted a lot of time trying stupid things that failed.

Today I finally gave up and ported the essential parts of the documentation to the latest version of Sandcastle and the Sandcastle Help File Builder.  It’s a little worse for wear but it’s still readable.

Anyways, now the old MbUnit v2 documentation is online again here: MbUnit v2 Documentation.

Maybe we can port some of that content to the wiki or book and update it for MbUnit v3…

Technorati Tags: mbunit,gallio

Edit: Posted new link to old MbUnit v2 wiki content.