How We Got Sandcastle Working With H&M

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dempseypat
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Joined: Tue May 16, 2006 6:55 am
Location: Pismo Beach, CA, USA

How We Got Sandcastle Working With H&M

Unread post by dempseypat »

We got Sandcastle working after we had a few false starts. We think it is because we installed Sandcastle Help & File Builder, and that seems to have caused errors with H&M.

We uninstalled everything having to do with Sandcastle and then installed Version 2.6.1062.1. Version 2.4 of Sandcastle did not work.

"Sandcastle Help & Filebuilder" is a GUI for Sandcastle and that seems to interfere with H&M. We wish it didn't because it has some nice features, such as being able to suppress inherited properties in the property lists so that just the table columns show. If others are using the Help & Filebuilder with H&M, we'd appreciate knowing what you did and what versions are being used.

Well Worth It
We downloaded Sandcastle at http://sandcastle.codeplex.com/ and we are using it to do the heavy lifting for documenting our API. The really nice thing is that you can have your own topics and the Sandcastle interface only replaces the topics that it created. The Sandcastle / H&M interface probably saved us 25 to 50 hours of help authoring not to mention all of the cross linking that gets done automatically.

I hope that H&M continues to expand its interface with Sandcastle. It would be great if H&M supported one of the code projects that is expanding the Sandcastle program since MSFT dropped it. We encountered some bugs in Sandcastle, like not always getting the remarks into the help, but they are not H&M bugs. That's why it would be important for H&M to continue developing the Sandcastle connection.

If there is new information, please let me know. Thanks.
Pat Dempsey
Pismo Beach, CA
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Tim Green
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Re: How We Got Sandcastle Working With H&M

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Pat,
We think it is because we installed Sandcastle Help & File Builder, and that seems to have caused errors with H&M.
We're looking into this but it's not really surprising that Help File Builder is causing problems if you are injecting it between Help & Manual and Sandcastle. Help & Manual's Sandcastle interface expects Sandcastle's standard output, and if you change it before it reaches Help & Manual you can expect trouble. 8)
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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