Recently I've been working on some DotNet components intended to be reusable. I've gotten the components to a point where I believe they are solid and now wanted to create some nice documentation for them, something like what's done for the Java or DotNet class libraries.
My initial thinking was to do something with XML, but Microsoft did something with Visual Studio that is just awesome. It turns out that it is possible to add embedded XML comments into the source that are automatically picked up by the object browser and which with a utility called "SandCastle" can be turned into very slick MSDN-style HTML documentation.
The embedded XML comments are automatically added by the C# Visual Studio editor, but if you're working in Visual Basic.NET (like me) then you will need the VBCommenter PowerToy, The VS 2005 SDK (includes the HTML help compiler), the SandCastle compiler, and this great SandCastle GUI.
It's very cool how easy the process of generating documentation is with these tools.
My initial thinking was to do something with XML, but Microsoft did something with Visual Studio that is just awesome. It turns out that it is possible to add embedded XML comments into the source that are automatically picked up by the object browser and which with a utility called "SandCastle" can be turned into very slick MSDN-style HTML documentation.
The embedded XML comments are automatically added by the C# Visual Studio editor, but if you're working in Visual Basic.NET (like me) then you will need the VBCommenter PowerToy, The VS 2005 SDK (includes the HTML help compiler), the SandCastle compiler, and this great SandCastle GUI.
It's very cool how easy the process of generating documentation is with these tools.
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