Sandcastle BuildAssembler.exe hangs when enabling Code Contract XML documenation

Question

We have an issue with BuildAssembler.exe v2.04.10520.0001, a tool included with sandcastle. We have patched sandcastle with the new files included in the latest release of Code Contracts. When we enable the Code Contract XML option BuildAssembler.exe just hangs when building the online help (it normally uses max cpu).

The strange thing is that we have this issue only on our Windows XP build system. Building help with Code Contract on other development systems (Win 7, XP) works oke.

Answer 1

Can you check if the XML you are processing is identical on the different systems?

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Cheers, -MaF (Manuel Fahndrich)

Answer 2

Hi Manuel,

I checked the XML output. There are a lot of differences between the original XML documentation files on both systems and also the ones that have the Code Contract info in them.

It seems that the files have the same information, but the order of the elements is very different. The order in which the code contract info is added is also different. Because the order is so different it is very difficult to tell if there are things missing in the XML files generated by the build system.

The main difference between the dev systems and the build systems is that the build systems uses msbuild directly while the dev systems build are normally done from within Visual Studio.

I will check if the difference is less when using msbuild directly on a dev system.

Victor

Answer 3

Hi Manuel,

We have done some clean-up of references from C# projects refered by our sandcastle help file builder project file and the issue is gone now. So for the moment you can consider this case closed.

Answer 4

Thanks for letting me know.

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Cheers, -MaF (Manuel Fahndrich)