LinLog

Here's some Friday humor for you: If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers.... Quite the humorous little piece. It comes from a web developer's point of view, but much of it applies to any kind of custom development.

It wasn't complete, though. One thing I missed was the requirement for psychic ability.
Customer: "Why doesn't it do X? It absolutely, positively has to do X or it's useless to us!"
Developer: "X? What's X? Nobody ever even mentioned X until just now!"
I guess that wouldn't fit into that piece, though, since it's set at the beginning of a project and the psychic ability conversation doesn't happen until you're in the middle of delivering.

It figures. After being so happy with SharpDevelop yesterday, I spent the better part of the morning fighting with it.

My problem was getting the context-sensitive help system to work with the .NET 2.0 SDK help files. To do this, you have to install the .NET 2.0 SDK, which is a 350MB download and over 600MB installed. Then you have to configure which help collection you want SharpDevelop to use.

Well, I did all that, but something wasn't right, because the dynamic help kept searching MSDN online instead of using the local files. I tried configuring it for some different help collections, hoping that maybe I just had the wrong one. But in the process, I somehow managed to break the help system completely. Not only was the dynamic help not using the local files, now the help index, contents, and everything else was gone too!

To cut a long story short, after spending way to much time searching and reinstalling, I finally stumbled upon this SharpDevelop forum thread, which clued me in to the solution. Apparently all I needed to do was open up "C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\.ICSharpCode\SharpDevelop2\help2environment.xml" and clear out the contents of the <collection> tag. After that, I restarted #Develop and the help was fine.