I was talking to a friend the other day about Inside OLE 2 by Kraig Brockschmidt. This was a book we referenced heavily in old projects.
If you're not familiar with the book it was considered THE book on OLE/COM until Don Box came along. People referred to the famous “6 month haze” that you wondered through before actually grasping the book.
After wondering what ever happened to Kraig, I googled to his Mystic Microsoft book. I can't find the book in print anywhere, it seems to only be available through this link. This link takes you to the “About the Author” section of the book, from there you can access any part of the book.
I'm happy to announce that .Math has gone 1.0. I started blogging at the same the time I decided to release the library - I started blogging the process here. NUnit tests have been added to the project and a full documentation set has been created as well. You can dive into the library along with documentation here.
I'm very happy with the experience. I really wasn't sure what to expect, but I received some great help along the way. The guys at ICSharpCode.net gave me some good hosting ideas, Jan Teilens provided some good code input, and Ali Pavaresh and Girish Bharadwaj lent some good old “spreading the word” to a small project. Thanks go out to Darrell Norton for bouncing some ideas on the inclusion of NUnit code on the project. I've got some other code I'd like to release shortly but some other projects are taking precedence right now.
This was a learning experience for me. Prior to this I hadn't taken any code down the open source route. If I had to condense the process into a short summary, I'd say review your licensing options first. There are plenty of standards out there you can borrow from. This is a choice you can make up front - you can always start overly restrictive and relax them as you go, but doing it the other way isn't a fair or (arguably) ethical practice. Next, find yourself a host. I looked at http://sourceforge.net and http://gotdotnet.com and there are others. A good hosting match depends largely on your team size, sharing of coding responsibilities, initial project state, etc.. Finally, I'd recommend blogging the experience. You won't always get feedback when you throw out ideas, but I always received input on the critical points. I also changed internet providers so I can provide a web page that demonstrates the project - I went with http://discountasp.net and I've been very happy with them (including service and performance). My site doesn't require much bandwidth but being able to host .NET code is a huge improvement. I'm happy to get out of a Linux hosting service that cost me roughly the same per month and offered me nothing from a development standpoint.
There have been over 150 downloads so far - pretty good for a niche piece of code. It'll be fun to continue watching the project grow. Thanks to everyone for their help - I apologize to anyone I forgot.
-Steve