According to an MSDN Forums post, Microsft is preparing to release a Community Tech Preview (CTP) of Sandcastle (Documentation Compiler), its answer to NDoc, the open-source generator for documentation from XML code comments.
According to Michael Primeaux, Sandcastle generates documentation using the following overall process:
Kris Cargile suggests:
According to Michael Primeaux, Sandcastle generates documentation using the following overall process:
The imminent Sandcastle release has prompted NDoc author Kevin Downs to officially discontinue NDoc development and withdraw from the open source community. In a letter to alpha testers earlier this week, Kevin also lamented the lack of code contributions to the SourceForge project, as well as a lack of financial contributions (donations) from the many users of the product, noting that "if only roughly 1-in-10 of the those who downloaded NDoc had donated the minimum allowable amount of $5 then I could have worked on NDoc 2.0 full-time and it could have been released months ago!"
- Use the "/doc" compiler option to generate an XML documentation file.
- Run the assemblies through Sandcastle (MRefBuilder, XslTransform, and BuildAssembler) to produce a set of HTML files.
- Generate resulting help using the Microsoft HTML Help Compiler. The help compiler version 1.0 is used to produce CHM files and version 2.0 is used to generate HXS files.
Kris Cargile suggests:
The simple fact is, if financial gain is your primary goal, you probably shouldn't invest your time in an open-source project.